Issue link: https://geospatial.trimble.com/en/resources/i/1397005
SOLUTION RLP AgroScience identified simplicity, reliability and flexibility as the three critical elements it needed to develop their automated vegetation-mapping solution. The company chose Trimble's eCognition® technology to provide them with the image- analysis tools to identify, delineate and classify landscape features as well as the adaptable framework to integrate regular data updates and deliver standardized results. Called "ALEK," (Automatic Landscape Feature Classification), RLP AgroScience's automated classification system combines customized eCognition and ESRI workflows to classify and map the entire region. Using existing 20-cm- resolution, orthorectified aerial images and digital surface models, eCognition methodically and automatically analyzes the imagery to identify and separate vegetation from non- vegetation. Based on physical properties and pre-defined, region-specific rules, it then determines each vegetation type such as trees or hedgerows. And finally, it delineates each vegetative object and produces georeferenced vector datasets of all classified vegetation. Those vector classifications are then ingested into ESRI ArcGIS to create EU-compliant data for the local ministry of agriculture's LPIS. With the ALEK system, RLP AgroScience was able to precisely classify and map the entire 19,000-sq-km Rhineland-Palatinate region in three months, significantly reducing the time, resources and costs that would be needed to manually produce the required datasets. "Manual digitization is not only incredibly tedious, it's subjective–15 people can interpret the same object 15 different ways–and prone to error," said Dr. Matthias Trapp, RLP AgroScience's head of environmental systems. "With eCognition's objective image analysis, we created standardized, reproducible results in a fraction of the time. Its speed, accuracy and data flexibility allowed our small team of image analysts to develop a fully automated, repeatable large-scale vegetation mapping system at no additional data cost to the ministry."