The effect of spectral and spatial degradation of hyperspectral imagery for the classification of Sclerophyll tree species

Hyperspectral imaging can be a useful remote-sensing technology for classifying tree species. Prior to the image classification stage, effective mapping endeavours must first identify the optimal spectral and spatial resolutions for discriminating the species of interest. Such a procedure may contribute to improving the classification accuracy, as well as the image acquisition planning. In this work, we address the effect of degrading the original bandwidth and pixel size of a hyperspectral and hyperspatial image for the classification of Sclerophyll forest tree species. A HySpex-VNIR 1600 airborne-based hyperspectral image with submetric spatial resolution was acquired in December 2009 for a native forest located in the foothills of the Andes of central Chile. The main tree species of this forest were then sampled in the field between January and February 2010. The original image spectral and spatial resolutions (160 bands with a width of 3.7nm and pixel sizes of 0.3m) were systematically degraded by resampling using a Gaussian model and a nearest neighbour method, respectively (until reaching 39 bands with a width of 14.8nm and pixel sizes of 2.4m). As a result, 12 images with different spectral and spatial resolution combinations were created. Subsequently, these images were noise-reduced using the minimum noise fraction procedure and 12 additional images were created. Statistical class separabilities from the spectral divergence measure and an assessment of classification accuracy of two supervised hyperspectral classifiers (spectral angle mapper (SAM) and spectral information divergence (SID)) were applied for each of the 24 images. The best overall and per-class classification accuracies (>80%) were observed when the SAM classifier was applied on the noise-reduced reflectance image at its original spectral and spatial resolutions. This result indicates that pixels somewhat smaller than the tree canopy diameters were the most appropriate to represent the spatial variability of the tree species of interest. On the other hand, it suggests that noise-reduced bands derived from the full image spectral resolution rendered the best discrimination of the spectral properties of the tree species of interest. Meanwhile, the better performance of SAM over SID may result from the ability of the former to classify tree species regardless of the illumination differences in the image. This technical approach can be particularly useful in native forest environments, where the irregular surface of the uppermost canopy is subject to a differentiated illumination.