Assessing alternative methods for unsupervised segmentation of urban vegetation in very high-resolution multispectral aerial imagery

To analyze types and patterns of greening trends across a city, this study seeks to identify a method of creating very high-resolution urban vegetation maps that scales over space and time. Vegetation poses unique challenges for image segmentation because it is patchy, has ragged boundaries, and high in-class heterogeneity. Existing and emerging public datasets with the spatial resolution necessary to identify granular urban vegetation lack a depth of affordable and accessible labeled training data, making unsupervised segmentation desirable. This study evaluates three unsupervised methods of segmenting urban vegetation: clustering with k-means using k-means++ seeding; clustering with a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM); and an unsupervised, backpropagating convolutional neural network (CNN) with simple iterative linear clustering superpixels. When benchmarked against internal validity metrics and hand-coded data, k-means is more accurate than GMM and CNN in segmenting urban vegetation. K-means is not able to differentiate between water and shadows, however, and when this segment is important GMM is best for probabilistically identifying secondary land cover class membership. Though we find the unsupervised CNN shows high degrees of accuracy on built urban landscape features, its accuracy when segmenting vegetation does not justify its complexity. Despite limitations, for segmenting urban vegetation, k-means has the highest performance, is the simplest, and is more efficient than alternatives.

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PID https://www.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0230856
PID pmc:PMC7205237
PID pmid:32379776
URL https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0230856
URL https://econpapers.repec.org/article/plopone00/0230856.htm
URL http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0230856
URL https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32379776
URL https://academic.microsoft.com/#/detail/3021411227
URL https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32379776/
URL https://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0230856
URL https://doaj.org/toc/1932-6203
URL http://europepmc.org/articles/PMC7205237
URL https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0230856
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Access Right Open Access
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Author Allison Lassiter, 0000-0002-0262-9350
Author Mayank Darbari
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Collected From PubMed Central; DOAJ-Articles; Crossref; Microsoft Academic Graph
Hosted By Europe PubMed Central; PLoS ONE
Journal PLoS ONE, 15, 5
Publication Date 2020-05-01
Publisher Public Library of Science
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Language English
Resource Type Article
keyword Q
keyword R
keyword keywords.General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology
system:type publication
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Source https://science-innovation-policy.openaire.eu/search/publication?articleId=dedup_wf_001::7abd9c9e964d3977fcb0157c04130268
Author jsonws_user
Last Updated 25 December 2020, 23:49 (CET)
Created 25 December 2020, 23:49 (CET)