A new method for discovery of vegetation changes based on satellite ground photographs

The normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) is widely used to detect ground vegetation based on remote-sensing satellite images. However, it is affected by deficiencies such as sensation to change in sun angle, atmospheric effects and noise contamination. As developing of high-resolution satellite ground photographs, a new approach of vegetation detection on ground photographs is proposed to automatically discover changes of vegetation on a specific area. The HSV color space is used to analyze vegetation areas, a new complexity index is defined to identify forest or grass. The experimental results show that the vegetation areas can be well separate from the Baidu satellite ground photographs and the changes of vegetation areas can be discovered using a set of new definitions of vegetation changes. The proposed method has potential to use in monitoring of plant ecology changes in agriculture, forestry human life environment. The new method can be used not only on the satellite ground photographs but also on the unmanned aerial vehicle images.