Fractional vegetation cover estimation based on an improved selective endmember spectral mixture model

Vegetation is an important part of ecosystem and estimation of fractional vegetation cover is of significant meaning to monitoring of vegetation growth in a certain region. With Landsat TM images and HJ-1B images as data source, an improved selective endmember linear spectral mixture model (SELSMM) was put forward in this research to estimate the fractional vegetation cover in Huangfuchuan watershed in China. We compared the result with the vegetation coverage estimated with linear spectral mixture model (LSMM) and conducted accuracy test on the two results with field survey data to study the effectiveness of different models in estimation of vegetation coverage. Results indicated that: (1) the RMSE of the estimation result of SELSMM based on TM images is the lowest, which is 0.044. The RMSEs of the estimation results of LSMM based on TM images, SELSMM based on HJ-1B images and LSMM based on HJ-1B images are respectively 0.052, 0.077 and 0.082, which are all higher than that of SELSMM based on TM images; (2) the R2 of SELSMM based on TM images, LSMM based on TM images, SELSMM based on HJ-1B images and LSMM based on HJ-1B images are respectively 0.668, 0.531, 0.342 and 0.336. Among these models, SELSMM based on TM images has the highest estimation accuracy and also the highest correlation with measured vegetation coverage. Of the two methods tested, SELSMM is superior to LSMM in estimation of vegetation coverage and it is also better at unmixing mixed pixels of TM images than pixels of HJ-1B images. So, the SELSMM based on TM images is comparatively accurate and reliable in the research of regional fractional vegetation cover estimation.