Census parcels cropping system classification from multitemporal remote imagery: a proposed universal methodology.

A procedure named CROPCLASS was developed to semi-automate census parcel crop assessment in any agricultural area using multitemporal remote images. For each area, CROPCLASS consists of a) a definition of census parcels through vector files in all of the images; b) the extraction of spectral bands (SB) and key vegetation index (VI) average values for each parcel and image; c) the conformation of a matrix data (MD) of the extracted information; d) the classification of MD decision trees (DT) and Structured Query Language (SQL) crop predictive model definition also based on preliminary land-use ground-truth work in a reduced number of parcels; and e) the implementation of predictive models to classify unidentified parcels land uses. The software named CROPCLASS-2.

Semi-automatic normalization of multitemporal remote images based on vegetative pseudo-invariant features.

A procedure to achieve the semi-automatic relative image normalization of multitemporal remote images of an agricultural scene called ARIN was developed using the following procedures: 1) defining the same parcel of selected vegetative pseudo-invariant features (VPIFs) in each multitemporal image; 2) extracting data concerning the VPIF spectral bands from each image; 3) calculating the correction factors (CFs) for each image band to fit each image band to the average value of the image series; and 4) obtaining the normalized images by linear transformation of each original image band through the corresponding CF. ARIN software was developed to semi-automatically perform the ARIN procedure. We have validated ARIN using seven GeoEye-1 satellite images taken over the same location in Southern Spain from early April to October 2010 at an interval of approximately 3 to 4 weeks.