Object-based retrieval of biophysical canopy variables using artificial neural nets and radiative transfer models

The retrieval of biophysical variables using canopy reflectance models is hampered by the fact that the inverse problem is ill-posed. This leads to unstable and often inaccurate inversion results. In order to regularize the model inversion, a novel approach has been developed and tested on synthetic Landsat TM reflectance data. The method takes into account the neighbouring radiometric information of the pixel of interest, named object signature. The neighbourhood data can either be extracted from gliding windows, already segmented images, or using digitized field boundaries. The extracted radiometric data of the neighbourhood pixels are used to calculate 42 descriptive statistical properties that comprehensively characterize the spectral (co)variance of the image object (e.g. mean and standard deviation of the distributions, intercorrelations between spectral bands, etc.). Together with the habitual spectral signature of the pixel being inverted (6 variables), this object signature (42 variables) is used as input in an artificial neural net to estimate simultaneously three important biophysical variables (i.e. leaf area index, leaf chlorophyll, and leaf water content). The use of neural nets for the model inversion avoids time-consuming iterative optimizations and provides a computational effective way to consider simultaneously pixel and object signatures.