sensors Article Distinguishing Planting Structures of Different Complexity from UAV Multispectral Images Qian Ma 1,2, Wenting Han 1,3,*, Shenjin Huang 3, Shide Dong 4 , Guang Li 3 and Haipeng Chen 3 1 Institute of Soil and Water Conservation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Ministry of Water Resources, Yangling 712100, China;
[email protected] 2 College of Advanced Agricultural Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China 3 College of Mechanical and Electronic Engineering, Northwest A&F University, Yangling 712100, China;
[email protected] (S.H.);
[email protected] (G.L.);
[email protected] (H.C.) 4 Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China;
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[email protected]; Tel.: +86-029-8709-1325 Abstract: This study explores the classification potential of a multispectral classification model for farmland with planting structures of different complexity. Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) remote sensing technology is used to obtain multispectral images of three study areas with low-, medium-, and high-complexity planting structures, containing three, five, and eight types of crops, respectively. The feature subsets of three study areas are selected by recursive feature elimination (RFE). Object-oriented random forest (OB-RF) and object-oriented support vector machine (OB-SVM) classification models are established for the three study areas. After training the models with the feature subsets, the classification results are evaluated using a confusion matrix. The OB-RF and OB-SVM models’ classification accuracies are 97.09% and 99.13%, respectively, for the low-complexity planting structure.