Do additional bands (coastal, NIR-2, red-edge and yellow) in worldview-2 multispectral imagery improve discrimination of an invasive Tussock, Buffel grass (Cenchrus ciliaris)?

Abstract

Our goals is to determine if Worldview-2 8-band multispectral imagery can be used to discriminate an invasive grass species namely, Buffel grass (Cenchrus ciliaris) in the subtropical arid parts of central Australia and whether it offers a tangible improvement on 4-band (visible and near infra red) multispectral imagery. A Worldview-2 scene was acquired for a 10*10km area just west of Alice Springs in central Australia following heavy rains of early Summer. Mixture Tuned Matched Filtering was used to classify the image. Target and background spectra were selected in the field and extracted from the image. Linear discriminate analysis (LDA) was used to examine the spectral separability of each group of the target/ background spectra. The importance of the additional spectral bands on the image classification was assessed by running LDA for both 8 and 4 bands (red, green, blue and NIR). LDA did not indicate improved separability between groups when additional spectral bands were applied. Preliminary classification results indicate that Buffel grass (Cenchrus ciliaris) is detected with an omission error 44%, commission error of 11.8% and overall accuracy of 59.5%. We were surprised that the additional spectral bands did not improve spectral separability and in part attribute this to the high degree of variance we observed within groups of spectra, which was particularly observable in the NIR2 and Yellow bands. The analyses may be significantly improved by acquiring imagery following the first big rains at the end of the dry season. At this time, phonological differences between our focal species and the surrounding native vegetation should be maximised. We suspect that Worldview-2 will offer even greater potential for the discrimination of Buffel grass under these conditions, being able to fully utilise the yellow-band in particular.