methods for differentiation between trees and grass

Im looking for methods to use to help differentiate roadside trees on a motorway from grass (as shown in the picture), which then later i can use this information to analyse the pixel values of the trees. (im not asking for any code, just ideas which i could maybe try and implement)

Answer 1

[Image Analyst]

Why? Why do you care about the nature off the road? Like what kind of plant it is? Just curious.

Anyway you could try a combination of color thresholding and texture segmentation.

Alternatively you could try SegNet deep learning but you'd have to outline/label dozens or hundreds of photos manually.

[Ajad Singh]

No specific plant, just want to see how quickly or slowly leaves on roadside trees turn green, yellow and lose leaves and then present that data. But i dont want include grass, as grass doesn't change colour much throughout the year.

[Image Analyst]

So do you have a camera in a fixed position that takes a photo every day? If so, you could just use fixed masks and then plot the LAB colors of the gamut and the year progresses? Or if you don't know anything about color science, just plot the mean RGB value in the mask with plot3() as a function of date.

[Image Analyst]

If it's bolted down I don't think it should change so much that your manually defined regions would change a great deal. So after taking the mean color of all the pixels inside the mask regions you'd have a pretty good idea of how the mean color changed with the seasons.

[Image Analyst]

SegNet demos attached. Adapt as needed.

Answer 2

[Benjamin Thompson]

That is a very complicated problem. See the example Semantic Segmentation Using Deep Learning in the Computer Vision Toolbox for a similar problem.

[Ajad Singh]

Do you think texture based image segmentation could work?

[Benjamin Thompson]

Try it and see. Remember you need a lot of data for this type of solution to work on full motion video. Trees and grass can look a lot different during different weather conditions, time of day, types of trees/grass species, whether the grass has been recently mowed, etc.

[Ajad Singh]

Im just using it on still images at the moment. But il give it a go. Thanks.