Covariate model of pixel vector intensities of invasive H. sosnowskyi plants

Abstract

This article describes an agricultural application of remote sensing methods. The idea is to aid in eradicating an invasive plant called Sosnowskyi borscht (H. sosnowskyi). These plants contain strong allergens and can induce burning skin pain, and may displace native plant species by overshadowing them, meaning that even solitary individuals must be controlled or destroyed in order to prevent damage to unused rural land and other neighbouring land of various types (mostly violated forest or housing areas). We describe several methods for detecting H. sos-nowskyi plants from Sentinel-2A images, and verify our results. The workflow is based on re-cently improved technologies, which are used to pinpoint exact locations (small areas) of plants, allowing them to be found more efficiently than by visual inspection on foot or by car. The re-sults are in the form of images that can be classified by several methods, and estimates of the cross-covariance or single-vector auto-covariance functions of the contaminant parameters are calculated from random functions composed of plant pixel vector data arrays. The correlation of the pixel vectors for H. sosnowskyi images depends on the density of the chlorophyll content in the plants. Estimates of the covariance functions were computed by varying the quantisation in-terval on a certain time scale and using a computer programme based on MATLAB. The correla-tion between the pixels of the H. sosnowskyi plants and other plants was found, possibly because their structures have sufficiently unique spectral signatures (pixel values) in raster images. H. sosnowskyi can be identified and confirmed using a combination of two classification methods (using supervised and unsupervised approaches). The reliability of this combined method was verified by applying the theory of covariance function, and the results showed that H. sos-nowskyi plants had a higher correlation coefficient. This can be used to improve the results in order to get rid of plants in particular areas. Further experiments will be carried out to confirm these results based on in situ fieldwork, and to calculate the efficiency of our method.