Utility of texture combinations computed from fused WorldView-2 imagery in discriminating commercial forest species

Commercial forest species discrimination is valuable for optimal management of commercial forests. Therefore, second-order image texture combinations computed from a 0.5 m WorldView-2 pan-sharpened image integrated with sparse partial least squares discriminant analysis (SPLS-DA) and partial least squares discriminant analysis (PLS-DA) were used to discriminate commercial forest species. The findings show that the SPLS-DA model, which is characterised by concurrent variable selection and reduction of data dimensionality, produced an overall classification accuracy of 86%, with an allocation disagreement of 9 and a quantity disagreement of 5. Conversely, the PLS-DA model with variable importance in projection (VIP) produced an overall classification accuracy of 81%, with an allocation disagreement of 12 and a quantity disagreement of 7. Overall, this study demonstrates the value of second-order image texture combinations in discriminating commercial forest species and presents an opportunity for improved commercial forest species delineation.