Evaluating the potential of GF-1 pan-multispectral camera imagery for identifying the quasi-circular vegetation patches in the Yellow River Delta, China

Abstract

Gaofen-1 (GF-1) is the first high resolution optical imaging satellite of China primary civilian Earth observation project under the China High-resolution Earth Observation System. With the GF-1 trio launched on March 31, 2018, the combined 3+1 GF-1 constellation will offer one-day revisit coverage, which provides more available high resolution remote sensing images for monitoring decametric-scale vegetation patches and long-term pattern dynamics. In this study, a panchromatic image, the original multispectral image, and the pan-sharpened multispectral image from GF-1 Panmultispectral Camera was compared to evaluate their potential for identifying the quasi-circular vegetation patches (QVPs) in the Yellow River Delta, China. The results showed that high spatial resolution was more important for identifying the QVPs than more additional spectral bands of GF-1, and the pan-sharpened multispectral image had the highest identification accuracy of the QVPs (F-measure is 64.6%). In the future, multi-temporal pan-sharpened GF-1 images should be used to obtain higher accuracy, which is basis for studying vegetation patch pattern dynamics.