Diagnostically counting palm date trees in Al-Ahssa Governorate of Saudi Arabia: an integrated GIS and remote sensing pr
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Diagnostically counting palm date trees in Al-Ahssa Governorate of Saudi Arabia: an integrated GIS and remote sensing processing of IKONOS imagery Shawky Mansour1,2
•
Jeganathan Chockalingam3
Received: 7 August 2019 / Revised: 5 January 2020 / Accepted: 9 January 2020 Korean Spatial Information Society 2020
Abstract Sustainability of date palm trees based economy envisages regular monitoring of spatio-temporal variations of these trees over time. But, field based counting is a very old style of managing trees which is labour intensive, costly and time consuming while modern geo-spatial technologies provides a fast, cheaper and accurate mechanism. In this regard, the current study attempts to formulate a repeatable and robust approach utilising high spatial resolution remote sensing data integrated with image processing technique and GIS functionalities in automatically extracting palm trees. The study was carried out over Al-Ahssa region in Saudi Arabia. Difficulties posed by dark and bright canopy situation is resolved in this study based on appropriate kernel (based on multiscale analysis) along with focal minimum and focal maximum functions, and individual tree locations were identified correctly. Supervised classification technique was utilised to differentiate trees from non-tree areas. The approach has successfully extracted date palm tree locations with an overall accuracy of 93% with an omission error of 5% and commission error of 4%.
& Shawky Mansour [email protected] Jeganathan Chockalingam [email protected] 1
Department of Geography, College of Arts and Social Sciences, Sultan Qaboos University, Muscat, Oman
2
Department of Geography and GIS, Faculty of Arts, Alexandria University, Alexandria, Egypt
3
Department of Remote Sensing, Birla Institute of Technology (BIT), Mersa, Ranchi, Jharkhand 835215, India
Keywords Tree counting Saudi Arabia High spatial resolution Al-Ahssa Date palm trees
1 Introduction Over centuries, Dates fruit has an important role in the lives of the inhabitants of the Arabian Peninsula. Many of the farmers depend on it as a source of livelihood for themselves and their families. Dates are a fruit that offer energy-rich states in the Arab Gulf and the Islamic countries in most of the main dish meals. Saudi Arabia is the homeland of date palm Trees. Currently, Saudi Arabia is the second largest producer of dates in the world [1, 2]. Date palm is an important fruit crop in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Its production in 2014 reached around 1.1 million tons ranged from 0.941 million tons in 2004 to 0.986 million tons in 2008 and the trees are grown over different regions of Saudi Arabia covering an area of 157,000 ha. The number of palm trees in the same year reached nearly 25 million [3]. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has realized the importance of date crop that is characterized by its value and economic importance and its role in achieving national food security. Consequently, the governmental policy prepared a number of incentive programs that support
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