Evaluation of Feature Extraction Methods for Classification of Palm Trees in UAV Images

Palm tree detection using remote sensing images has received increasing attention in recent years, concerning the issues of sustainability, productivity and profitability. There has been significant progress in the research of using machine learning techniques, especially convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for automatic palm tree detection. However, whether CNNs can actually outperform traditional human-engineered approaches in terms of classification accuracy and detection speed is yet unknown. In the present study, we have compared human-engineered features namely histogram of oriented gradients (HOG), local binary pattern (LBP) and scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) with features extracted using pre-trained AlexNet model for detecting palm trees in high resolution images obtained via unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Support vector machines (SVM) with linear and non-linear kernels were used to classify feature vectors obtained by different feature extractors. Haar-like features used in Viola-Jones framework was also tested in the study. Results showed that features extracted from the fifth convolutional layer of AlexNet achieved the highest accuracy of 96.1% using SVM with RBF kernel as classifier, which surpassed the accuracy obtained by fully-connected CNN, namely 95.6%. The results also suggest that SVM classifier with radial basis function (RBF) kernel using LBP as features is the optimal combination as it achieved comparable accuracy but higher detection speed than CNN approaches.