The ERTS-1 investigation (ER-600)

The Agriculture Analysis Team of the Johnson Space Center conducted a 1-year-long investigation of ERTS-1 multispectral data to evaluate how well features of agricultural importance could be detected, identified, and located; and their areal extent measured. Six study areas were selected in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Two basic analytical approaches were used to meet the objectives. The conventional image interpretation technique revealed that a particular color was an indication of the density of vegetative cover, not an indication of crop classification. Computer-aided techniques were used to classify crop types (i.e., small grains, truck farm crops, grasses, summer fallow) to accuracies as high as 95 percent on large (12 hectares or more) well-defined fields. A further breakdown into crop species (wheat, barley, soybeans, oats, corn) reduced the accuracy to 70 to 80 percent for single-date observations.