Numbisi, F.N.; Van Coillie, F.M.B.; De Wulf, R. Delineation of Cocoa Agroforests Using Multiseason Sentinel-1 SAR Images: A Low Grey Level Range Reduces Uncertainties in GLCM Texture-Based Mapping.. ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf.2019, 8, 179.
Numbisi, F.N.; Van Coillie, F.M.B.; De Wulf, R. Delineation of Cocoa Agroforests Using Multiseason Sentinel-1 SAR Images: A Low Grey Level Range Reduces Uncertainties in GLCM Texture-Based Mapping.. ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2019, 8, 179.
Numbisi, F.N.; Van Coillie, F.M.B.; De Wulf, R. Delineation of Cocoa Agroforests Using Multiseason Sentinel-1 SAR Images: A Low Grey Level Range Reduces Uncertainties in GLCM Texture-Based Mapping.. ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf.2019, 8, 179.
Numbisi, F.N.; Van Coillie, F.M.B.; De Wulf, R. Delineation of Cocoa Agroforests Using Multiseason Sentinel-1 SAR Images: A Low Grey Level Range Reduces Uncertainties in GLCM Texture-Based Mapping.. ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2019, 8, 179.
Abstract
Delineating the cropping area of cocoa agroforests is a major challenge for quantifying the contribution of the land use expansion to tropical deforestation. Discriminating cocoa agroforests from tropical transition forests using multi-spectral optical images is difficult due to a similarity in the spectral characteristics of their canopy; moreover, optical sensors are largely impeded by the frequent cloud cover in the tropics. This study explores multi-season Sentinel-1 C-band SAR image to discriminate cocoa agroforests from transition forests for a heterogeneous landscape in central Cameroon. We use an ensemble classifier, random forest, to average SAR image texture features of GLCM (Grey Level Co-occurrence Matrix) across seasons; next, we compare classification performance with results from RapidEye optical data. Moreover, we assess the performance of GLCM texture feature extraction at four different grey level quantization: 32bits, 8bits, 6bits, and 4bits. The classification overall accuracy (OA) of texture-based maps outperformed that from an optical image; the highest OA of 88.8% was recorded at 6bits grey level. This quantization level, in comparison to the initial 32bits in SAR images, reduced the class prediction error by 2.9%. Although this prediction gain may be large for the landscape area, the resultant thematic map reveals the decrease and fragmentation of forest cover by cocoa agroforests. According to our classification validation, the Shannon entropy (H) or uncertainty provides a reliable validation for class predictions and reveals detail inference for discriminating inherently heterogeneous vegetation categories. The texture-based classification achieved a reliable accuracy considering the heterogeneity of the landscape and vegetation classes.
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
