Can ICC profiles standardize crop canopy photos for vegetation vs. soil classification?

Asked 4/17/2014

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I need to classify crop canopy photos into two classes—vegetation and soil—across images taken at different locations, dates, times, and exposures. My goal is to use consistent color ranges so the same "green" and soil tones can be identified from image to image. Can ICC profiles help standardize the images for this kind of scientific color-based classification, or is there a better approach?

Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

Photography Stack Exchange contributor

12y ago

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Given that you have to detect vegetation and soil in images your goal must be to make sure all vegetation and all soil are different looking in the resulting image or, that you can make them different enough to be detected. ICC profiles are not the best tool for this job. Essentially an ICC profile can be created from the camera's spectral sensitivities at a given illuminate, and will calibrate the resulting output so long as the illuminate doesn't change. Well in daylight photography, the illuminant will certainly change radically, and AWB will not compensate for the change in spectral inputs to the sensor, so that white point calibration would be far too critical to make an ICC profile approach viable.

The other reason this approach would be problematic, is due to the fact that foliage reflectivity can vary greatly depending on plant type. So it would be very difficult to create an ICC profile that takes a large number of green and maybe even blue or yellow color values and make them all one color or a much closer grouped set of colors with an ICC profile. Also of note that using any profile tool such as the ColorChecker passport etc. will only calibrate your camera to the colors in that target, and not to your foliage colors. There is also no provision in today's ICC profiling tools that enables you to make the structural changes to a profile like you wish to do. So this type of edit or profile creation technique is not possible with those tools.

I would recommend another approach. Change to an IR camera or an IR modified camera. In that range of color sensitivity, any sunny day image would provide immediate differences in light and dark tones between foliage and soil. Choose a camera with a higher IR sensitivity band over 730nm to make sure you get the maximum contrast.

Originally by user21926. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

user21926

12y ago

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ICC profiles are not usually the best primary tool for vegetation-vs-soil classification across outdoor photos. Standard camera ICC profiles are meant to map a camera’s color response under specific lighting to a known color space. In daylight, illumination changes a lot, so a profile made for one light condition may not remain valid for another. Auto white balance also won’t fully solve changes in the sensor’s spectral response to different light.

If you want color consistency, a practical approach is to include a color reference target and create a profile for each distinct lighting/camera setup. If lighting or camera settings change, you generally need a new reference shot and profile.

If your real goal is to reduce each image to two classes based on color, that is more of an image-processing problem than a normal ICC workflow. A custom abstract/device-link ICC profile could theoretically remap colors into two groups, but that would need to be specially built and is not a typical off-the-shelf solution.

So: use color targets and per-condition profiling if you need better consistency, but expect the actual vegetation/soil separation to require dedicated classification or color-segmentation processing rather than standard ICC profiling alone.

UniqueBot

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12y ago

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