A New Vegetation Enhancement/Extraction Technique for IKONOS and QuickBird Imagery

Author

Tu, Te-Ming ; Lu, Hung-Tao ; Chang, Yu-Chun ; Chang, Jyh-Chian ; Chang, Chien-Ping

Author_Institution

Dept. of Electr. & Electron. Eng., Nat. Defense Univ., Taoyuan

Volume

6

Issue

2

fYear

2009

fDate

4/1/2009 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

349

Lastpage

353

Abstract

Most image fusion techniques are designed for multispectral (MS) images with natural color responses. If there is an unnatural spectral response, the fused image will be unsuitable for visualization. To enhance the vegetation content in such cases, applying the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) to tune the color of MS images is a feasible approach. However, the NDVI is usually used to generate lower resolution vegetation maps, and particularly, the threshold needs to be chosen manually for various scenes. In order to avert this drawback, using VI with a fixed threshold, a method is developed for IKONOS and QuickBird images in this letter, which integrates a fast technique of intensity-hue-saturation fusion. For MS images with unnatural color responses on vegetation areas, experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively enhance and extract vegetation information from the IKONOS and QuickBird images.

Keywords

feature extraction; geophysical techniques; geophysics computing; image enhancement; image fusion; remote sensing; vegetation; IKONOS imagery; NDVI; QuickBird imagery; intensity-hue-saturation fusion; lower resolution vegetation maps; multispectral images; natural color responses; normalized difference vegetation index; unnatural spectral response; vegetation content; vegetation enhancement-extraction technique; Image fusion; intensity-hue saturation (IHS); vegetation enhancement; vegetation index (VI);

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters, IEEE

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

1545-598X

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/LGRS.2009.2012442

Filename

4785221