Estimating crop acreage from space-simulated multispectral scanner data

The need for multispectral data processing methods to permit the estimation of proportions of objects and materials appearing within the instantaneous field of view of a scanning system is discussed. An algorithm developed for proportion estimation is described as well as other supporting processing techniques. Application of this algorithm to space-simulated multispectral scanner data is discussed and some results presented and compared. Results indicate that, for this data set, the true proportions of the various crops contained within this data set are with one exception more closely in agreement with the proportions determined by the proportion estimation algorithm than with the proportions determined by conventional classfication algorithm.