Spatial video remote sensing for urban vegetation mapping using vegetation indices

Urban vegetation is important because of the fast-growing urbanization. If we want cities to have sustainable growth and well-kept ecology, we need to develop a smart and efficient urban vegetation monitoring system. This paper examines the possibility of using a modified GoPro camera mounted on a car. The lens of a GoPro camera was replaced with the NDVI-7 lens to obtain blue, green and near-infrared band. The performance of four vegetation indices was tested: Blue normalized difference vegetation index (BNDVI), Green normalized difference vegetation index (GNDVI), Green-blue normalized difference vegetation index (GBNDVI), Blue-wide dynamic range vegetation index (BWDRVI). Based on those indices, binary classification was performed to classify objects in the scene as either vegetation or non-vegetation. Finally, the accuracy of each index was assessed on three different study sites. Results show that GBNDVI performs best for the given task with average classification accuracy of 95.10% for all study sites.