Vineyard Segmentation from Satellite Imagery Using Machine Learning

Steep slope vineyards are a complex scenario for the development of ground robots due to the harsh terrain conditions and unstable localization systems. Automate vineyard tasks (like monitoring, pruning, spraying, and harvesting) requires advanced robotic path planning approaches. These approaches usually resort to Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) techniques to acquire environment information, which requires previous navigation of the robot through the entire vineyard. The analysis of satellite or aerial images could represent an alternative to SLAM techniques, to build the first version of occupation grid map (needed by robots). The state of the art for aerial vineyard images analysis is limited to flat vineyards with straight vine's row. This work considers a machine learning based approach (SVM classifier with Local Binary Pattern (LBP) based descriptor) to perform the vineyard segmentation from public satellite imagery. In the experiments with a dataset of satellite images from vineyards of Douro region, the proposed method achieved accuracy over 90%.