Use of macro texture for landscape units mapping from satellite images: application to vegetation-density mapping in arid and semi-arid areas

The definition of macro-texture proposed here comes from granulometric analysis which is a way to describe statistically the size of the connected components in a binary. The pixels of the binary image are classified according to the quantitative descriptors provided by this analysis. The whole procedure is applied here to the mapping of the density of the vegetation cover in arid lands from SPOT and thematic mapper.