Identification of trees in the shade of houses in residential areas using airborne multi-spectral images

The purpose of this study is to identify vegetation covers shaded by buildings and other structures in detached housing areas in the land cover classification using airborne MSS data. This paper presents a method to identify evergreen trees in the shade using remotely sensed data of surface temperature observed in summer and winter, based on the characteristics that the nighttime surface temperature of green tree crown is lower in summer and higher in winter than that of other materials. The vegetation indexes were also used in order to reduce the misclassifications. It was found that 70% of the shaded evergreen trees which were unidentified by the previous method were able to be identified using the proposed method.