Using the Canny edge detector and mathematical morphology operators to detect vegetation patches

Numbers and areas and locations of vegetation community patch are the important parameters for vegetation function and structure researches. In this paper, these parameters of vegetation patches are detected using the Canny edge detector and mathematical morphology operators. Firstly, part of a SPOT 5 fusion-ready color image is transformed into the gray image, then, stretched according to the histogram of the gray image in order to enhance the interesting vegetation patches. Secondly, using the Wiener filter to remove the noise and Canny edge detector to find the edges of the targets in the gray image. Finally, vegetation patches are detected based on the mathematical morphology criterion of circle and ellipse object and the centers of the patches are located. The experiments show that integration the Canny edge detector with the algorithms for extracting circle and ellipse object based on mathematical morphology are simple and effective for detecting vegetation patches.