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The increasing expansion of rubber plantations throughout East and Southeast Asia urgently requires improved methods for effective mapping and monitoring. The phenological information from rubber plantations was found effective in rubber mapping. Previous studies have mostly applied rule-pixel-based phenology approaches for rubber plantations mapping, which might result in broken patches in fragmented landscapes. This study introduces a new paradigm by combining phenology information with object-based classification to map fragmented patches of rubber plantations in Xishuangbanna. This research first delineated the time windows of the defoliation and foliation phases of rubber plantations by acquiring the temporal profile and phenological features of rubber plantations and natural forests through the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) data. To investigate the ability of finer resolution images at capturing the temporal profile or phenological information, 30 m resolution Landsat image data were used to capture the temporal profile, and a phenology algorithm to separate rubber plantations and natural forests was then defined. The derived phenology algorithm was used by both the object-based and pixel-based classification to investigate whether the object-based approach could improve the mapping accuracy. Whether adding the phenology information to the object-based classification could improve rubber plantation mapping accuracy in mountainous Xishuangbanna was also investigated. This resulted in three approaches: rule-pixel-based phenology, rule-object-based phenology, and nearest-neighbor-object-based phenology. The results showed that the rule-object-based phenology approaches (with overall accuracy 77.5% and Kappa Coefficients of 0.66) and nearest-neighbor-object-based phenology approach (91.0% and 0.86) achieved a higher accuracy than that of the rule-pixel-based phenology approach (72.7% and 0.59). The results proved that (1) object-based approaches could improve the accuracy of rubber plantation mapping compared to the pixel-based approach and (2) incorporating the phenological information from vegetation improved the overall accuracy of the thematic map. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pixel-based (PB) and geographic-object-based (GEOBIA) classification approaches allow the extraction of different objects from multispectral images (MS). The primary goal of this research was the analysis of UAV imagery applicability and accuracy assessment of MLC and SVM classification algorithms within PB and GEOBIA classification approaches. The secondary goal was to use different accuracy assessment metrics to determine which of the two tested classification algorithms (SVM and MLC) most reliably distinguishes olive tree crowns and which approach is more accurate (PB or GEOBIA). The third goal was to add false polygon samples for Correctness (COR), Completeness (COM) and Overall Quality (OQ) metrics and use them to calculate the Total Accuracy (TA). The methodology can be divided into six steps, from data acquisition to selection of the best classification algorithm after accuracy assessment. High-quality DOP (digital orthophoto) and UAVMS were generated. A new accuracy metric, called Total Accuracy (TA), combined both false and true positive polygon samples, thus providing a more comprehensive insight into the assessed classification accuracy. The SVM (GEOBIA) was the most reliable classification algorithm for extracting olive tree crowns from UAVMS imagery. The assessment carried out indicated that application of GEOBIA-SVM achieved a TACOR of 0.527, TACOM of 0.811, TAOQ of 0.745, Overall Accuracy (OA) of 0.926 or 0.980 and Area Under Curve (AUC) value of 0.904 or 0.929. The calculated accuracy metrics confirmed that the GEOBIA approach (SVM and MLC) achieved more accurate olive tree crown extraction than the PB approach (SVM and MLC) if applied to classifying VHR UAVMS imagery. The SVM classification algorithm extracted olive tree crowns more accurately than MLC in both approaches. However, the accuracy assessment has proven that PB classification algorithms can also achieve satisfactory accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]