Texture estimates of operational forestry parameters

The main objective of this research was to investigate the relationship between synthetic aperture radar image texture and operational forestry parameters. Two other related issues were also investigated: determining the benefits of speckle-filtering before measuring the texture and selecting a texture feature (Markov random field texture models or gray level co-occurrence texture statistics) which best characterizes the texture. The results indicate that there exists a relationship between synthetic aperture radar image texture and the operational forestry parameters of rainforest on Vancouver Island. The results also suggest that speckle-filtering before collecting texture features was not beneficial and that Markov random field texture models did not perform better than gray level co-occurrence statistics.