Orthophoto-Based Vegetation Patch Analyses—A New Approach to Assess Segmentation Quality

Abstract

The following paper focuses on evaluating the quality of image prediction in the context of searching for plants of a single species, using the example of Heracleum sosnowskyi Manden, in a given area. This process involves a simplified classification that ends with a segmentation step. Because of the particular characteristics of environmental data, such as large areas of plant occurrence, significant partitioning of the population, or characteristics of a single individual, the use of standard statistical measures such as Accuracy, the Jaccard Index, or Dice Coefficient does not produce reliable results, as shown later in this study. This issue demonstrates the need for a new method for assessing the betted prediction quality adapted to the unique characteristics of vegetation patch detection. The main aim of this study is to provide such a metric and demonstrate its usefulness in the cases discussed. Our proposed metric introduces two new coefficients, M+ and M−, which, respectively, reward true positive regions and penalise false positive regions, thus providing a more nuanced assessment of segmentation quality. The effectiveness of this metric has been demonstrated in different scenarios focusing on variations in spatial distribution and fragmentation of theoretical vegetation patches, comparing the proposed new method with traditional metrics. The results indicate that our metric offers a more flexible and accurate assessment of segmentation quality, especially in cases involving complex environmental data. This study aims to demonstrate the usefulness and applicability of the metric in real-world vegetation patch detection tasks.