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Multi-Sensor Data Fusion for Modeling African
Palm in the Ecuadorian Amazon
Carolina Santos and Joseph P. Messina
Abstract
African oil palm ( Elaeis guinensis) is the most productive
oil seed. Globally, the oil palm industry plans to double
the area under cultivation to meet growing demands for
both vegetable oils and biodiesel. Accurate assessment and
monitoring of African palm extensification and intensification
for both development and sustainability is crucial given that
these crops are replacing the natural high-biodiversity forests
as well as local subsistence agriculture. Using a simultaneous
collection of RADARSAT synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and
ground based digital video, we describe and model the
spatial distribution of African palm and explore its lifecycle
placing it in the regional ecological context of the Ecuadorian,
Amazon. We evaluate the strengths and limitations of integrat-
ing RADARSAT texture information, Landsat ETM, and digital
video data to distinguish African oil palm plantations from
other land-use and land-cover (LULC) categories. The grey-level
co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) and a separate hybrid classifica-
tion approach using a concatenation of SAR-optical products
were tested. A significant improvement in the classification
accuracy of African palm in the context of the Ecuadorian
Amazon was obtained through the fusion of optical and
RADARSAT texture measures as compared to single sensor
classifications. The fusion of single ETM bands with texture
measures achieved the highest user’s and producer’s accu-
racy with 83 percent and 90 percent, respectively.
Introduction
African Palm
African (oil) palm (Elaeis guinensis), a species of West African
origin, is an edible vegetable oil produced from the fruit of the
oil palm tree. It has been under export production in West
Africa from the mid-1800s and has emerged as one of the
most significant globally distributed agricultural products.
Ecuador is, after Colombia, the second largest producer of
palm oils in South America (Corley and Tinker, 2003; Dai and
Khorram, 1998; Guerra de la Espriella, 1984). Palm oil and its
derivatives are used extensively in food, cosmetics, pharma-
ceuticals, detergents, and, more recently, in biodiesel produc-
tion (Anderson and Fegusson, 2006; Corley and Tinker,
2003). Demand for palm oils is expected to double by 2020
(Mielke, 2000), and it has also been proposed by aid agencies
as a substitute for illegal coca crops (Moreno, 2000; Ramírez,
2003). Unfortunately, African palm cultivation has been linked
elsewhere to deforestation, biodiversity declines, soil degrada-
tion, environmental pollution, and appropriation of indige-
nous lands, challenging the suitability of the non-native
Department of Geography, Michigan State University and the
Center for Global Change and Earth Observations, Michigan
State University (santosca@msu.edu).
PHOTOGRAMMETRIC ENGINEERING & REMOTE SENSING
palm for Latin America (Aratrakorn et al., 2006; Dennis and
Colfer, 2006; Linkie et al., 2003; WRM, 2001)
The African palm is a tall palm (8 to 20 m) with a
heavy, ringed trunk. It is monoecious with male and female
flowers, in separate clusters, on the same tree. Roughly, five
female inflorescences are produced per year with each
inflorescence weighing about 8 kg and the fruits weighing
about 3.5 g each. Natively, the palm is found in lowland or
riverine forests. It requires adequate light and soil moisture,
and can tolerate temporary flooding or a fluctuating water
table. It prefers 1,780 mm to 2,280 mm rainfall per year and
a 2 to 4 month dry period. African palm oil cultivation was
introduced in Ecuador in the late-1960’s from Honduran
seeds (Corley and Tinker, 2003; Goh, 2000; Hartley, 1988).
Uplands provide the most suitable environments in the
Ecuadorian, Amazon, as regional rainfall is typically well
above the ideal, and the upland drainage is required for
sustained palm growth. After deforestation, 75 to 150 palms
per hectare are planted, each about 10 meters apart. Propa-
gation is difficult; most seedling palms are produced in
Santo Domingo, on the coast, and trucked into the region at
about 18 months. In much of the region, ground covers (e.g.,
Calopogonium caeruleum) are planted between seedlings to
fix nitrogen and reduce secondary succession growth. The
palm grows about one meter per year. The first fruit bunches
ripen in as few as 2.5 years after planting, but 3 to 4 years is
more typical, and productivity and quality improves with
age. Harvesting is usually done once per week with workers
harvesting 100 to 150 bunches per day. Bunches are then
transported to local mills for oil extraction. Production of
African palm in the Ecuadorian Amazon is approximately
17.4 tm/ha/year compared with the yield in the coastal plain
of approximately 10.0 tm/ha/year (Galarza, 1998).
While there are many forces driving deforestation in
the Ecuadorian Amazon, an intense deforestation period
occurred in the late-twentieth century when large planta-
tions of African palm were introduced. Shortly after the
introduction of the palm, petroleum was discovered. Initial
clearings and road construction associated with oil explo-
ration and development opened a new colonization frontier
(Sierra, 2000). Immigration, settlement, and further land
clearing took place early in the 1970’s and peaked during
1979 through 1981 (Pichon, 1997; Rudel and Horowitz,
1993). In 1978, two palm oil companies, Palmoriente and
Palmeras del Ecuador, received titles from the Ecuadorian
Institute of Agrarian Reform and Colonization (IERAC) for
Photogrammetric Engineering & Remote Sensing
Vol. 74, No. 6, June 2008, pp. 711–723.
0099-1112/08/7406–0711/$3.00/0
© 2008 American Society for Photogrammetry
and Remote Sensing
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10,000 ha each of “undeveloped” rainforest in the North-
ern-Oriente region (Figure 1). Both plantations remain, and
after initial small clearings, have expanded to roughly
10,400 ha and 9,200 ha cleared lands, respectively.
Although land-use histories and transformations have
been documented with remote sensing in tropical areas
with similar land-cover dynamics (Dennis and Colfer, 2006;
Hansen, 2005), a thorough accounting of forested areas lost
to African palm has not been pursued. In addition, no
formal accounting of the carbon dynamics of African palm
plantation agriculture exists, thus the question remains as
to whether the reduction of CO2 emissions by replacing
fossil fuels with African palm derived biodiesel is meaningful.
Furthermore, most related studies are descriptive, do not
focus on African palm plantations specifically, or lack the
interactive effects of the multiple human and biophysical
variables operating at different spatial-temporal scales.
Remote sensing and spatial analyses provide tools to fill
this information gap. A first step in answering any synoptic
African palm question requires the development of an
appropriate methodology for monitoring African palm
plantations and that potentially accounts for the separability
of different crop stages. The purpose of this paper is to
characterize African palm plantation agriculture in the
Ecuadorian Amazon through the integration and modeling
of synthetic aperture radar (SAR), ground based digital video,
and Landsat Enhanced Thematic Mapper (ETM) data, and
to assess methods for the combination of these disparate
data sources for land-use and cover mapping.
Specifically, we aim to answer the following questions:
1. Does the incorporation of radar information in the classifica-
tion process improve our ability to characterize African
palm?
Figure 1. Landsat ETM scene of the study area, Northern-Oriente, Ecuador. The white
squares indicate the location of Palma Oriente and Palmeras del Ecuador: two African
Palm plantations.
712 June 2008
2. Which radar-optical data fusion combination(s) is/are more
suitable to provide information about African palm?
3. How can ground digital video data be incorporated in a
geospatial context to understand African palm agriculture
dynamics and advance the classification process?
Remote Sensing and African Palm
Palm oil research groups have long promoted remote sensing
applications, but little has been published. Several potential
application areas have been identified: establishment and
management of plantations, crop monitoring, yield predic-
tion, and carbon sequestration (Corley and Tinker, 2003;
da Costa, 2004). A common requirement for the successful
development of these applications is the establishment of
a digital set of methods that first attempts to clearly distin-
guish African palm from the surrounding land-cover classes,
and second, accounts for stand ages (Corley and Tinker,
2003). Previous studies have used either differences in
biomass or ancillary stand age structure to attempt such
a distinction (McMorrow, 2001; Thenkabail et al., 2004).
Ikonos data have been used to map African palm plantations
at local scales with accuracies ranging from 84 to 92 percent.
However, the distinction of palm ages was unsuccessful,
suggesting that the four spectral bands available with Ikonos
are insufficient (Thenkabail et al., 2004).
The most relevant previous attempt to map oil palm
with radar data used JERS-1 and ERS-1 data over a plantation
in Malaysia (Rosenqvist, 1996). Malaysian plantations are
organized following a symmetrical triangular pattern on
predominantly flat ground and in terraces on relief. Palms
are allowed to grow for a period of 20 to 25 years before
clearing or transplanting. The result of this cycle was an
easily discernable mosaic of clear cuts and fields, but
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significant challenges emerged in determining stand age,
vitality, and production status (Rosenqvist, 1996).
In another attempt, McMorrow (2001) explored the
feasibility of using a single TM band or vegetation indices to
obtain information at pixel and stand levels of aggregation
in a commercial African palm plantation in Malaysia. The
author found that the relationships between palm age and
spectral response were negative, significant, and asymptotic,
suggesting that regression models could be used to predict
dichotomous age categories (McMorrow, 2001). One signifi-
cant problem remains the lack of cloud-free optical imagery
over the requisite tropical environments (Naert et al., 1990;
Nguyen et al., 1995). However, even when cloud-free imagery
are available, the complicated spectral mixed pixel relation-
ship of palm plantations have frustrated many other research
efforts (Corley and Tinker, 2003).
Perhaps the most important factor that halts the wide-
spread adoption and general sustainability of African palm in
the Northwestern Amazon basin, generally, is intense preda-
tion by a range of pests and plant diseases, in particular, a
previously unknown bud-root disease, similar to Pudricion
del cogollo PC (Diaz and Castellano, 1988; Perthuis, 1991).
The first phase of the illness lasts for approximately 12 years
with 1 percent of palms affected per year. The exponential
phase (phase 2) occurs at 13 or 14 years of cultivation with
12 to 15 percent of the plants affected. After phase 2 infec-
tion, many plots are abandoned and allowed to fallow for five
years before replanting. A border effect has been identified
with the first cases occurring in plots located along primary
forest edges (De Franqueville, 2003).
In our own work in Ecuador (NASA NAG 5–12617), the
identification of African palm has been hampered by the
complex mixed pixel plantation environment, the prevalence
of the wasting disease, which causes palm frond drop, and
spectral confusion with native palms and other palms used
for palm heart production (often, Bactris gasipaes, “chon-
taduro”). No previous work either directly in support of our
project or published elsewhere has been able to successfully
classify African palm anywhere in the Northwest Amazon
with accuracies above 50 percent, leading to the solution
presented here.
Radar and Palm Discrimination
Synthetic Aperture Radar SAR is an active sensor, collects
information in longer wavelengths than passive optical
sensors, and has significant potential as a complementary
data set (Pohl and van Genderen, 1998; Qi et al., 2003).
The basic quantity measured by a single-frequency single
polarization SAR at each pixel is a pair of voltages that
represent the effects of the scene on the transmitted wave.
These measurements are determined by electromagnetic
scattering processes (Oliver and Quegan, 1998); the back-
scatter signal is sensitive to the dielectric constant, related
to moisture content. Because of this characteristic, SAR has
been used primarily for applications that require an estimate
of moisture status (Lillesand et al., 2004; Oliver and Quegan,
1998). However the backscatter signal is not only affected by
the electrical characteristics of an object; it is also affected
by object geometry (Lillesand et al., 2004). Therefore, SAR
is sensitive to surface roughness, topography, and sensing
system parameters such as depression or incident angles
(Qi et al., 2003)
One major advantage of SAR data over optical data is in
the ability to penetrate cloud cover (Lillesand et al., 2004).
For African palm remote sensing, this is particularly impor-
tant, since African palm plantations are replacing the natural
tropical forests in areas with high humidity and persistent
cloud cover (Dennis and Colfer, 2006). Since signal response
depends on structure, the electrical properties of the surface
PHOTOGRAMMETRIC ENGINEERING & REMOTE SENSING
rather than on surface reflectance, it ought to be useful in
the discrimination African palm stand ages given that both
biomass and structure of African palm trees change substan-
tially in plots of different ages.
Radar Texture
Textural information may be as important as spectral infor-
mation for radar images (Anys and He, 1995; Haralick, 1979;
Haralick et al., 1973); for radar images, the information
resides not only in the intensity of individual pixels but
also in the spatial arrangement of those pixels (Herold et al.,
2005). Texture refers to the variation presented in discrete
tonal features across an image and provides information
about the structural characteristics of surfaces and their
relationship with their surroundings (Jensen, 2005).
There have been many attempts to incorporate texture
in image processing using either statistical or structural
approaches (Haralick, 1979). Statistical methods use texture
features based on first, second, and third order statistics in
the spatial domain (Jensen, 2005). The second-order statistics
method was proposed by Haralick et al., (1973) based on
brightness value spatial-dependency grey-level co-occurrence
matrices (GLCM) (see e.g., Nyoungui et al., 2002). The GLCM
measurements have been widely accepted by the remote
sensing community and have been used in both optical and
SAR remote sensing for classification procedures (Franklin
et al., 2001; Jensen, 2005).
GLCM texture measurements of radar images have been
used successfully for wetland mapping (Arzandeh and
Wang, 2002), forest classification (Oliver and Quegan,
1998), crop monitoring and classification (Anys and He,
1995; Pultz and Brown, 1987), ice texture estimations
(Barber and Ledrew, 1991) and land-cover classification
(Arzandeh and Wang, 2002; Nyoungui et al., 2002; Peng et al.,
2005). Arzandeh and Wang (2002) examined GLCM texture
measurement using different sized matrices, and concluded
that the use of texture measurements greatly improved the
classification of wetlands. Furthermore, they suggested that
GLCM texture measurement was an appropriate method for
land-cover classification of single date RADARSAT information.
Anys et al., (1995) used multi-polarization data and texture
measures from airborne radar data and reported an increase
of 9.79 percent in the rate of correct crops classification
crops. Pultz and Brown (1987) used five of the GLCM
measurements (contrast, correlation, dissimilarity, mean,
and standard deviation) proposed by Haralick, (1973 and
1979), and found that the classification of agricultural
targets improved significantly over the use of traditional
classification on multispectral data.
However, the process is difficult and not always success-
ful. Prasad and Gupta (1998) in the Godavari region of India
used texture measures preceded by speckle-filtering which
resulted in a 10 percent decrease of the overall accuracy.
The texture measures they used were contrast, entropy, angular
second moment, and homogeneity. Frequently, overall
accuracy is improved by using GLCM texture measures over
the radar raw data, but not all measures achieve positive
results. It is important to include measures that account for
the majority of the variance in the data. The fusion of optical
and radar data in LULC change research has improved the
discrimination of classes not distinguishable with spectral
optical information alone (Toll, 1985). Data fusion has been
used successfully for precision agriculture (Qi et al., 2003),
LULC mapping (Haack and Bechdol, 2000; Haack et al., 2000;
Raghavswamy et al., 1996), and urban delineation (Haack
et al., 2000). Conversely, Henderson (2002) reported that the
synthesis and concatenation fusion of raw SAR and optical
imagery did not clearly improve the land-cover class discrimi-
nation. No conclusive agreement has been reached as to the
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optimal combinations of optical and radar data for LULC
applications (Herold et al., 2005).
Study Area
The study site (Figure 1) is located in the headwaters of the
Napo river watershed in Northern-Oriente of Ecuador in the
Napo, Sucumbios, and Orellana Departments. The climatic
conditions, high rain regime, and humidity make the Oriente
a highly suitable environment for African palm. During
June 2005, we were given unprecedented access to the
Palma Oriente plantation, the largest industrial African palm
plantation in the region, and the immediate surrounding
area (Figure 2). A network of roads inside and adjacent to
the plantation allowed the collection of ground digital video
data. Although the area initially appeared homogeneous,
and we believed this to be the case prior to our research
trip, the landscape is a complex mosaic of different land-use
and cover classes; African palm, the dominant land-cover, is
intermixed with unmanaged secondary (regeneration) forest,
moderately managed balsa secondary forest, pasture, palmito
(palm heart), and rice. African palm plots at different stages
were distributed throughout the plantation. Examples of
the different African palm stages found at Palma Oriente
plantation are shown in Figure 3.
Figure 2. (a) Radar (RADARSAT), and (b) ETM (Landsat) images of the Palm
plantation “Palma Oriente.” The white tracks are ground control points extracted
from the video data.
714 June 2008
Methods
Datasets
A RADARSAT C-band SAR image was acquired on 14 June
2005 with HH polarization and fine beam mode 15-meters
spatial resolution (posting). The optical remote sensing
image used was an Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM)
image (path 9, row 60) acquired on 25 October 2002 (Figure 2).
This ETM scene is the most current cloud free, error free
scene. Although the radar and ETM images are more than
two years apart, this time difference is not expected to affect
African palm classification given the growth rate of African
palm and its characteristics as a permanent crop.
The ETM image, originally a L1G product, was pre-
processed to surface reflectance. Radiance calibration
(Thome et al., 1997), top of the atmosphere reflectance
(Irish, 2000), and atmospheric noise removal using the
5S model (Tanre et al., 1990) were performed as part of
the preprocessing procedures. No speckle reduction filters
were applied to the RADARSAT image before texture extrac-
tion. Previous studies reported that speckle correction does
not improve classification accuracy and could cause loss
of textural information, affecting the ability of radar to
discriminate among classes (Herold and Haack, 2002;
Treitz et al., 2000).
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Figure 3. African Palm stages present at Palma Oriente: (a) young, (b) mature, (c) old, (d) diseased,
(e) African Palm fruit, and (f) diseased.
For image fusion, accurate geometric fidelity is particularly
important since the image merge occurs on a pixel-by-pixel
basis (Jensen, 2005; Townshend et al., 1992). The ETM
image was geometrically corrected using an extensive
ground control dataset to the UTM WGS84 coordinate system.
The optical and radar images were co-registered using
ENVI 4.2. The RMS was 0.48, representing an area of about
15-meters on the ground with nearest neighbor used as the
image resampling method.
Video Data Sampling and Processing
Ground digital video data along roads in the “Palma
Oriente” palm plantation were recorded 10–16 June 2005.
The digital video system comprised two Sony digital
camcorders, coupled with a Garmin GPSMAP 76 handheld
GPS and a GeoStamp® Plus data integration unit from
Intuitive Circuits. The video data encompassed the main
roads across the plantation and two neighboring roads
outside it (Figure 2). The 15 hours of ground based digital
Figure 4. Frames extracted from the video data. The black circles indicate the GPS coordinates for the
individual frames.
PHOTOGRAMMETRIC ENGINEERING & REMOTE SENSING
video data collected from 11 tapes were processed and
divided into clips using Movie MakerTM. For example,
one tape with 48 minutes of video was transformed into
220 clips. Frame extraction was then performed using the
220 video clips resulting in 634 sampled frames. Examples
of frames extracted from the video data are shown in Figure 4.
The GPS-derived coordinate information is located in the
upper left corner on each frame. Additional information
such as time, date, elevation, and speed is also available
for each individual frame. Each sampled video frame was
assigned a LULC class; the LULC class and the location of
the video frame on the ground were stored in a database.
The sampling methodology used yielded in most cases
more than one ground point per each 30 m  30 m pixel,
therefore for the accuracy assessment, the dataset was
randomly filtered to assure that no more than one ground
control point was used per pixel (Hess et al., 2002). Inde-
pendent datasets extracted from the ground video data
were used for training and for validation.
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Radar Texture texture derivation. An unsupervised classification per-

The textural procedure used to extract information from the
RADARSAT image was the co-occurrence measure filter as
proposed by Haralick (1973) (Table 1); the textures were
extracted directly from the RADARSAT image without speckle
correction. The grey-level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM)
measurements are based on the pixel spatial arrangement in
the radar image and provide the co-occurrence probability of
pairs of grey-level pixels within a local window. There are
four parameters to be considered when generating GLCM
products: (a) window size, (b) inter-pixel angle, (c) inter-pixel
distance, and (d) quantization level. The window size defines
the extent over which the GLCM is computed, inter-pixel angle
and inter-pixel distance define the neighborhood relationships
for the pairs of the pixels, and quantization level refers to the
number of grey-levels in an image, i.e., radiometric resolution
(Haralick et al., 1973; Herold et al., 2005).
Previous studies indicated that the size of the moving
window used to calculate texture measurements can
affect the accuracy of the classification. Smaller window
sizes were suggested as causes of misclassification at the
boundaries between classes (Hsu, 1978). Similarly, Haack
(2000) argued that increasing window sizes produced a
systematic increase in the overall classification accuracy.
Based on the previous literature and the extent of the
study area, moving window sizes of 3 * 3, 7 * 7, 9 * 9,
13 * 13, and 15 * 15 were explored and tested for the radar
formed on the derived textures at different window sizes
indicated a moving window of 13 * 13 as the most suitable
for the land-cover classification in the region.
Image Fusion
Principal component analysis (PCA), widely applied in remote
sensing, is used for image encoding, image data compression,
image enhancement, digital change detection, multitemporal
dimensionality, and image fusion (Jensen, 2005; Pohl and van
Genderen, 1998; Canty, 2007). In this study, PCA was used to
reduce data dimensionality in order to provided statistically
meaningful numbers of training pixels for less common classes
such as diseased palm. The radar textures and the ETM data
were fused using the concatenation technique, where specific
radar texture measurements, optical bands, and PCA compo-
nents are added as discrete bands (Pohl and van Genderen,
1998). One of the challenges in radar-optical fusion is the
integration of disparate data types (16-bit radar versus 8-bit
optical). In this study, the ETM preprocessing techniques and
the texture derivation resulted in a transformation of both
original data types to float preventing any processing issues
caused by data type disparity.
The digital fusion combinations used are described
in Table 2. No previous studies indicated the best combina-
tion for African palm detection. However, combinations of
TM-PCA with individual texture images have yielded superior

TABLE 1. THE TEXTURE MEASUREMENTS USED. THE TERMS IN THE FORMULAE ABOVE ARE: N IS THE
NUMBER OF GREY LEVELS; P IS THE NORMALIZED SYMMETRIC GLCM OF DIMENSION NXN; AND Pi, j IS
TH
THE (i,j ) ELEMENT OF P (HARALICK ET AL., 1973; OLIVER AND QUEGAN, 1998)

Parameter/Significance Formula

Mean: a measure of both tone N1 N1

and texture information; MEAN  mI    i  Pi,j
calculates the average grey level i0 j0

over a defined window size

Contrast: the measure of the contrast or N1 N1

the amount of local variation present in the CON    Pi,j  (i  j)2
image. High values indicate contrasting grey i0 j0

tones in the image.

Angular Second Moment: a measure of

textural uniformity. This value is large when N1 N1
there is less local texture variation; the case ASM    P2i,j
when the grey-level distribution is constant i0 j0

or is periodic.

Correlation: a measure of grey tone linear

dependencies in the image. It is expressed N1 N1
(i  mI)  (j  mJ)
by the correlation coefficient between COR    sI  sJ
grey-levels and the probability densities i0 j0

at each of the grey-level pairs

Entropy: a measure of image disorder. N1 N1

If the image texture is not uniform several ENT    Pi,j  ln Pi,j
of the measurements for the GLCM will have i0 j0

small values causing entropy to be large.

N1 N1
Dissimilarity: a measure similar to contrast DIS    Pi,j  |i  j|
that shows the differences. i0 j0

N1 N1
Variance: a measure of image heterogeneity. STD  sI 
x i0 j0
 Pi,j  (i  m I)2

Homogeneity (inverse difference moment): N1 N1

Pi,j
a measure of homogeneity; if the differences in HOM    1  (i  j)2
pairs of grey-levels are small this value will be large i0 j0

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TABLE 2. DIGITAL COMBINATIONS OF RADAR TEXTURE MEASURES, ETM PCA,

AND INDIVIDUAL ETM BANDS. ALL THE TEXTURE MEASURES WERE CALCULATED
WITH A 13  13 WINDOW SIZE AND RESAMPLED TO THE ETM SPATIAL
RESOLUTION OF 30 M

Combination Radar ETM

Combination 1 Mean  Variance PCA1 (Bands 1, 2, 3, 4, 5,

and 7)
Combination 2 Mean  Variance PCA1 and 2 (Bands 1, 2,
3, 4, 5, and 7)
Combination 3 Mean  Variance  PCA1, 2, and 3 (Bands 1, 2,
Angular Second Moment 3, 4, 5, and 7)
Combination 4 Mean  Variance  Individual Bands (Bands 1, 2,
contrast  correlation 3, 4, 5, and 7)
Combination 5 Mean PCA1, 2, and 3 (Bands 1, 2,
3, 4, 5, and 7)

producer’s accuracies compared with fusion of individual
TM bands with radar data (Henderson et al., 2002; Herold
and Haack, 2002). Alternatively, the mean and the variance
radar texture measures were selected for four of the
combinations as they carry a large portion of the structural
information of radar images and have been successfully used
for crop classifications (Anys and He, 1995). The radar
texture measures used for the data fusion were all derived
using a 13  13 window size and resampled to a 30 m
spatial resolution using a nearest neighbor algorithm.
Classification
The six cover types selected for this experiment were water,
secondary forest, African palm, diseased palm, grasslands,
and barren/urban. Spectral signatures were developed
from training areas extracted from the digital ground video.
The average number of pixels used for training of the
different land-cover types varied from 102 to 1,267 pixels
for each class, sufficient for acceptable estimates of the
covariance matrices and mean vectors to yield adequate
representation of each spectral class (Lillesand et al., 2004).
Two different strategies were used to collect the training
areas. First, manual selection of training sites was performed
based on the location of classes from the video data (see
e.g., Torbick et al., 2005). The training set was then applied
to the original datasets and to the combinations. In the
second, independent training sites were developed for each
of the combinations, ETM, and radar texture measurements.
The locations of the training sites were determined using
the ground video data points then modeled with a seed
growing algorithm using a standard deviation multiplier
of 1.0 and 4 pixel neighborhood. The discriminative power
of the spectral signatures for the selected classes was
measured using the transformed divergence and the Jeffreys-
Matusita distances (Swain and Davis, 1978). A standard
maximum likelihood supervised classification technique was
applied to combinations 1 through 5, the ETM image, and
the radar texture measures (Jensen, 2005). Classification
performance was evaluated using a second dataset derived
from the ground video data. The validation set of points
was independent from the points used for training, and
exceeded 50 samples for each class in the error matrix
(Congalton, 2004; Congalton and Green, 1999). The condi-
tional Kappa statistics for each class were also calculated.
Results and Discussion
PCA transformation of the ETM image was performed using
bands 1 to 5 and band 7. The first three PCA components
account for as much as 99.28 percent of the variability present
in the image (Table 3). PCA1 presented a strong correlation with
band 5 and less information from bands 6 and 4 (Table 4). PC2
correlated primarily with band 4, and PCA3 with band 6.
The results were evaluated by comparing the accuracy
assessment of individual land-cover classes and by looking at
the separability of pair classes for the original datasets and for

TABLE 3. EIGENVECTORS AND EIGENVALUES COMPUTED FOR THE COVARIANCE MATRIX. THE THREE COMPONENTS
THAT ACCOUNT FOR 99.28 OF THE VARIANCE ARE SHOWN

Component Eigenvector Eigenvalues % Variance Accumulative

PCA1 0.009043 0.024571 0.021772 0.004578 73.049305 73.04930589

PCA2 0.212463 0.271629 0.365799 0.001425 22.738152 95.78745811
PCA3 0.431812 0.513490 0.505464 0.000219 3.4944949 99.28195309

TABLE 4. DEGREE OF CORRELATION BETWEEN EACH ETM BAND AND EACH PCA TRANSFORMATION
COMPONENT

PC1 PC2 PC3 PC4 PC5 PC6

Band 1 0.0573057 0.0707238 0.0201767 0.0730721 0.0385896 0.0205136

Band 2 1.3463834 0.7818426 0.3389959 0.0319456 0.0514483 0.0635654
Band 3 2.7364037 1.4780026 0.4684273 0.0211198 0.0411547 0.0098195
Band 4 0.0175092 0.6610585 0.1117642 0.0072089 0.0409879 0.1067278
Band 5 5.43902 0.483844 0.4374357 0.0026741 0.0077261 0.0073676
Band 6 1.1272174 2.2565236 0.5658912 0.0036169 0.0024996 0.0138353

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the various manipulations and data fusion combinations. The
Jeffreys-Matusita and the transformed divergence measures
both indicated that Combination 4 generated the best separa-
bility of all combinations or original data sets. Table 5 shows
the results of the transformed divergence separability measure
by class pairs. The pair classes not included in Table 5
presented a divergence separability measure distance of 2.0
indicating separate classes. The smallest separability distance
using the same training sites was given by Combination 1 for
the barren-forest pair. The class pair least likely to be effec-
tively separated was diseased palm and African palm with
separability of 1.74312724 for this combination. This result is
predictable given the transitional nature of the disease within
the productive palms locations.
For the accuracy assessment, 276 pixels were randomly
selected for African palm, 86 for grassland, 50 for diseased
palm, and 269 for secondary forest, respectively. Primary forest,
water and urban classes were excluded since these classes were
not present at “Palma Oriente” Plantation or captured on the
digital video used in the class assignment procedure. However,
previous research in the region has demonstrated high levels of
accuracy for those classes (e.g., Messina and Walsh, 2005).
While better than previous classification efforts, the
classification performed using texture measures alone derived
from the RADARSAT data over the 13 * 13 moving window
provided relatively poor classification results. The producer’s
accuracy for African palm was 60 percent and the user’s
accuracy was 76 percent (Table 6). The overall accuracy was
52 percent; the main confusion was between the grassland
class and all the other classes except diseased palm. Although
the radar products presented transformed divergence separabil-
ity measures for diseased palm ranging from 1.98 to 1.99, they
were unable to effectively discriminate the class. The pro-
ducer’s accuracy was 24 percent with the user’s accuracy
31 percent (Table 6). Several factors could be responsible for
these results. Though unlikely, the window size may be too
large compared to the actual extent of this particular class
on the ground. Crop classification improvements might be
achieved by reducing the window size, since the efficacy of the
window sizes is related to the variability and spacing of the
ground features of interest (Anys and He, 1995; Treitz et al.,
2000). Diseased palm ground cover is highly variable in local
intensity and distributed widely over small spatial extents.
In addition to the transitional confusion mentioned
previously, another possible explanation for the low textural
identification accuracy of the diseased palm stage was the
relatively low number of training pixels as well as the likely
structural confusion with productive palms. Recall that the
diseased palms lose their fronds or suffer significant wilting,
but the landscape structure remains similar due to standing
trunks. The low overall accuracy of the radar texture clas-
sification could be caused by the presence of redundant
information. Redundant information introduced by using
the eight individual texture measures in the classification
process at the same time might lead to confusion among
different land-cover classes (Fawwaz et al., 1986).
An analysis of the results for the ETM data classification
demonstrated an overall classification accuracy of 67 percent,
superior to the one exhibited by the radar texture but less
than several of the digital fusion combinations. The producer’s

TABLE 5. TRANSFORMED DIVERGENCE SEPARABILITY MEASURES BY PAIRS OF CLASSES FOR RADAR,

ETM AND FOR THE DATA FUSION COMBINATIONS

Separability Radar
Pairs Texture ETM Comb 1 Comb 2 Comb 3 Comb 4 Comb 5

African Palm- 1.4038 1.1934 1.058 1.5267 1.7789 1.8281 1.5329

Secondary forest
African Palm- 1.9993 1.4493 1.5834 1.7884 1.8901 1.7431 1.9737
Diseased Palm
African Palm- 1.4751 1.8327 1.809 1.8189 1.8791 1.9401 1.7737
Forest
African Palm- 1.6595 1.8247 1.8117 1.8344 1.8828 1.9339 1.8251
grassland
Barren – 1.8322 1.9999 1.9509 1.9952 1.9999 1.9999 1.9998
Secondary
forest
Barren – 1.9999 2.0000 1.9960 1.9999 1.9999 1.9999 1.9995
Diseased Palm
Barren – Forest 1.6991 1.9999 0.8772 1.9985 1.9999 1.9999 1.9999
Barren – 1.9738 2.000 1.9999 1.9999 2.000 2.000 1.9999
Grassland
Barren – 1.7297 1.9999 1.7025 1.9985 1.9999 1.9999 1.9996
African Palm
Forest- 1.3370 1.4823 1.8356 1.8535 1.8719 1.9167 1.8168
Secondary
forest
Forest- 1.9993 1.9722 1.9872 1.9921 1.9968 1.9993 1.9737
Diseased palm
Secondary 1.9872 1.3257 1.9226 1.9439 1.9808 1.9941 1.7496
forest –
Diseased palm
Grassland- 1.4468 1.9987 1.9729 1.9974 1.9998 1.9998 1.9989
Secondary
forest
Grassland – 1.9967 1.9999 1.9999 1.9999 1.9999 1.9999 1.9999
Diseased Palm
Grassland – 1.8182 1.9999 1.9999 1.9999 1.9999 1.9999 1.9999
Forest
Water-Forest 1.7474 1.9999 1.9695 1.9999 1.9999 1.9999 1.9999

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TABLE 6. CONTINGENCY TABLE FOR RADAR TEXTURES CLASSIFICATION (MEAN, VARIANCE, CONTRAST,
CORRELATION, ANGULAR SECOND MOMENT, ENTROPY, DISSIMILARITY, AND HOMOGENEITY)

African Diseased Secondary Row Producer’s User’s

Radar Palm Palm Grass Forest Rotal Accuracy Accuracy

African 167 2 41 8 218 60% 76%

Palm
Diseased 1 12 2 23 38 24% 31%
Palm
Grass 80 11 30 89 210 34% 14%
Secondary 28 25 13 149 215 55% 69%
forest
Total 276 50 86 269 681
Overall 52%
Accuracy

accuracy for African palm was 69 percent and the user’s
accuracy was 77 percent. The three spectral signatures least
likely to be successfully discriminated by the ETM data were
African palm, diseased palm, and secondary forest. The
transformed divergence separability measure for these pair
classes was 1.1934 for African palm-secondary forest, 1.3257
for secondary forest-diseased palm, and 1.4493 for African
palm-diseased palm. Although the accuracy assessment
(Table 7) reflects, in part, this confusion, a visual examination
revealed an overestimation of the secondary forest and
diseased palm ground cover extents in areas likely to be
African palm. The introduction of radar information as shown
in Combinations 1 through 4 appears to provide a way to
counter the overestimation of these two land-cover classes.
The confusion among these land-cover classes as well as the
overestimation of the diseased and secondary forest class
extents may be due to the insensitivity of ETM to structural-
geometric differences in areas with high biomass content.
These classification results far exceed previous efforts over
the Oriente, in large part, but not entirely due to the access
afforded to the plantation combined with an increase in
samples and a better understanding of the local LULC matrix.
All digital data fusion combinations exhibited improved
accuracies over those achieved by each sensor alone.
Combination 1 yielded an overall accuracy of 71 percent.
The producer’s and user’s accuracy for African palm in this
combination was 74 percent and 91 percent, respectively.
In spite of this relatively high accuracy for the African palm
land-cover class, the separability distances were low for the
separability pairs African palm-secondary forest (1.058) and
African palm-diseased palm (1.5834). The main confusion
problems were found between African palm and secondary
forest. In a visual analysis of Combination 1 classification,
the main element to highlight was a substantial decrease
in the extent of the area classified as diseased palm com-
pared to the ETM classification. The diseased palm stage
changed from not being effectively identified in the radar
texture classification alone and overestimated in extent in
the ETM classification, to a more realistic spatial distribution
for the class. This suggests that the additional information
provided by the mean and the variance texture measurements
are sufficient to increase the accuracy of the diseased palm
class by 10 percent to 30 percent (Tables 8, 9, and 10).
The overall accuracy for Combination 2 was 69 percent;
the producer’s accuracy for African palm was 70 percent and
the user’s accuracy was 90 percent. The lowest separability
distances were again African palm-secondary forest and
African palm-diseased palm separability pairs. The separabil-
ity measures were slightly higher for this combination than
for Combination 1. However, the inclusion of the second
component of the ETM PCA did not substantially increase
the accuracy achieved by this combination.
A visual inspection of Combination 3 showed a better
delineation of the forest and barren/urban land-cover classes.
The overall accuracy was 73 percent; the producer’s accuracy
for African palm was 73 percent and the user’s accuracy was
89 percent. The addition of the angular second moment and
PCA3 information seemed to promote better separability between
the bare and forest classes with an increase in the transformed
divergence separability measure from 0.8772 in Combination 1
to 1.999 in this combination for the bare-forest separability pair.
The best overall accuracy was achieved by Combina-
tion 4 at 78 percent. This combination included the six
single ETM bands and four of the radar texture measure-
ments (Table 9; Figure 5). The transformed divergence
separability measures for the separability pairs were in the
range from 1.8281 to 2.0, indicating acceptable separation
among classes (Jensen, 2005). The producer’s accuracy for

TABLE 7. CONTINGENCY TABLE FOR ETM CLASSIFICATION (BANDS 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, AND 7)

African Diseased Secondary Row Producer’s User’s

ETM Palm Palm Grass Forest Total Accuracy Accuracy

African 191 6 3 50 250 69% 76%

Palm
Diseased 4 21 15 10 50 46% 42%
Palm
Grass 0 4 64 25 93 74% 68%
Secondary 81 19 4 184 288 68% 63%
forest
Total 276 50 86 269 681
Overall 67%
Accuracy

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TABLE 8. CONTINGENCY TABLE FOR COMBINATION 1 (MEAN, VARIANCE, AND PCA

ETM BANDS 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, AND 7)

Combination African Diseased Secondary Row Producer’s User’s

1 Palm Palm Grass Forest Total Accuracy Accuracy

African 206 3 7 8 224 74% 91%

Palm
Diseased 0 35 10 19 64 70% 54%
Palm
Grass 20 0 69 62 151 80% 45%
Secondary 50 12 0 180 242 66% 74%
forest
Total 276 50 86 269 681
Overall 71%
Accuracy

TABLE 9. CONTINGENCY TABLE FOR COMBINATION 4 (MEAN, VARIANCE, CONTRAST,

CORRELATION, AND ETM BANDS 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, AND 7)

Combination African Diseased Secondary Row Producer’s User’s

4 Palm Palm Grass Forest Total Accuracy Accuracy

African 230 1 3 19 253 83% 90%

Palm
Diseased 2 41 4 5 52 82% 78%
Palm
Grass 2 3 62 42 109 72% 56%
Secondary 42 5 17 203 267 75% 76%
forest
Total 276 50 86 269 681
Overall 78%
Accuracy

TABLE 10. ACCURACY ASSESSMENT AND KAPPA FOR THE The results of both the transformed divergence separabil-
AFRICAN PALM LAND-COVER CLASS ity measure and the accuracy assessment demonstrated that
the main challenge for the accurate classification of the land-
Producer’s User’s Kappa cover classes proposed in this study is the broad signature
Dataset Accuracy Accuracy Coefficients
of the secondary forest class. Secondary forest, in particular,
Radar 60% 76% 0.439 is a problematic class, since it is composed of a complex
ETM 69% 77% 0.480 mixture of vegetation and structures that may include
Combination 1 74% 91% 0.502 spectrally and structurally similar native palm trees. The better
Combination 2 70% 90% 0.652 performance of Combination 4 suggested that the individual
Combination 3 73% 89% 0.684 ETM bands instead of the derivative PCA components maybe
Combination 4 83% 90% 0.704 more effective for the classification of African palm. The overall
Combination 5 61% 71% 0.440 accuracies reported in this study are lower than published
results in other general land-cover mapping activities using
optical-radar data fusion (Herold et al., 2005), but higher
palm was 83 percent whereas the user’s accuracy was than results reported for texture based classification alone
90 percent. An application of Combination 4 over a larger (Prasad and Gupta, 1998). Further, the results presented here
extent, using the same class signatures, demonstrated a are the first successful remotely sensed models of African
realistic classification of “Palmeras del Ecuador” a similar palm agriculture in South America.
African palm plantation (Figure 6). No accuracy assessment
of the Palmeras del Ecuador classification was performed Conclusions and Future Directions
due to a lack of ground data. African palm is widely, and increasingly, promoted as an
Combination 5 achieved the lowest accuracy of the merged alternative agricultural crop throughout much of the world
combinations at 68 percent. Visual examination revealed and particularly in the Andean countries of South America.
similarities to the ETM classification with an over estimation The expansion is not without environmental and social
of the areas classified as secondary forest and diseased palm. risks. It is a difficult crop to remotely monitor, but the use
The producer’s accuracy for palm was 62 percent whereas the of active sensors combined with fieldwork does show some
user’s accuracy was 73 percent (Table 10). The similarities promise. The individual sensor datasets used in this
with the ETM are not surprising since only one band out of research were less effective than the combined datasets for
four bands total corresponded to the radar information. This accurately identifying land-cover classes across the study
gave a disproportionate share of the spectral information to the site, in particular and importantly, African palm. Combina-
ETM data. This result suggested that mean texture alone does tions of radar and optical data significantly improved the
not provide enough new information to affect the classification classification results for African palm. However, the wide
outcomes for this application. variability in the efficacy of the combinations for identifying

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Figure 5. LULC classification of Palma Oriente using Combination 4.

the different LULC classes suggests that the best processing information causing some class specific confusion in the
strategies may be land-cover specific. Further, exploration classification process.
of individual radar texture measures is required since In general, an increase in the amount of information
different measures may be providing redundant or correlated included in the digital data fusion combinations improved

Figure 6. LULC classification of Palmeras del Ecuador using Combination 4.

PHOTOGRAMMETRIC ENGINEERING & REMOTE SENSING June 2008 721

MM-3.qxd 5/15/08 1:30 AM Page 722
classification performance. Individual ETM bands merged
with textural measures from the radar yielded better results
than PCA ETM components. For African palm classification,
the best results were obtained by merging all the optical bands
with variance, mean, contrast, and correlation radar texture
measures. Disproportionate shares of information between
radar-optical information caused a decrease in the ability of
the digital data fusion combinations to effectively discriminate
land-cover classes. The poor classification results for Combi-
nation 5 suggested that not only is a balance in the amount
of the optical-radar information merged in the combination
important, but also that the variance plays an important role
in the delineation of African palm. For classes that are rare
and small in extent, a decrease in the window size used to
derive textural information could potentially improve the
ability of the merged datasets to delineate the class. Practi-
cally, African Palm and diseased palm discrimination might
be more successful by incorporating a stratified classification
using texture measures derived at different windows sizes.
Further exploration of radar-optical fusion combinations
targeting the specific land-cover classes present in Ecuadorian
African palm plantations is needed. It is expected that a
combination of radar-optical data will discriminate palm
stages given the sensitivity of radar to roughness-geometry
and dielectric constant. Although maximum likelihood
classifiers are currently used in related land-cover fusion
analysis, exploration of classifier methods such as neural
networks and decision trees could potentially help improve
classification accuracies for texture metrics that do not present
a normal distribution.
For the Amazon basin specifically, SAR information plays
an important role for African palm monitoring as the areas
suitable for cultivation are usually characterized by persistent
cloud cover. For tropical areas generally, a better understand-
ing of the radar signal is important as some uncertainty in
the modeling is introduced by locally variable atmospheric
conditions. African palm monitoring in many Amazon Basin
countries is further complicated by the similarities between
African palm and cananguchal, a type of flooded forest
composed mainly by a palm (Mauritia flexuosa). SAR provides
what may be the only remote sensing option to effectively
distinguish these cover types. Future areas of research for
African palm monitoring with radar systems should include
the use of multi-date and multi-polarization images. The use
of time series of radar images has not being extensively
explored but has shown some promise for the improvement
of classification accuracies (Prasad and Gupta, 1998). Multiple
polarization images ought to provide more structural informa-
tion allowing for a better discrimination of targets with
different geometric components.
Despite the significant processing time required the
ground based digital video collection proved vital and
provided significant advantages over traditional ground
control point collection. As an alternative to a static collection
of points, it was possible to sample the video information in
many different ways providing essentially different independ-
ent datasets. It has a higher spatial resolution than most aerial
photography, certainly any collected in Ecuador, providing
information for better understanding of the dynamics of
land-cover, and offers an alternative spatial and structural
perspective very useful for integration with SAR data.
In Ecuador, African palms are promoted to small-scale
farmers as an effective and lucrative alternative to cattle,
and, at first glance, this might appear to be true. Unfortu-
nately, the palm disease is far more widespread than
previously thought and disease management strategies
such as fallowing with rice, while effective, are costly.
Previous work in the region overestimated the spatial
extent (survivability) of African palm plantations leading
722 June 2008
to very low classification accuracies for palm. African
palm is likely to become the most significant agricultural
crop in South America. The combination of radar data
with digital video field collections is a promising method-
ology for the long term synoptic monitoring of the palm.
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June 2008 723
 Ca l e n d a r
June
24 - July 4, ENEREGION - Summer School
2008 — Regional Potentials for Renewable
Energy Generation, Salzburg University’s
Centre for Geoinformatics, Salzburg, Austria.
For more information, visit www.edu-zgis.
net.
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bile and Location Based Services, Salzburg
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www.edu-zgis.net.
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21-25, GeoWeb 2008: Infrastructure:
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