Classification of farmland images based on color features

•The applications on farmland environmental perception.•Adopts multiple color spaces to conduct the classification.•Applies to a particular field of farmland image with different environments.

Farmland images recognition and classification are of great significance in farmland environmental perception. Since the open and unstructured farmland environment has complex scenes, and is easily affected by various factors, furthermore, environmental information is uncertain and hard to predict. Based on hue saturation value (HSV), hue saturation lightness (HSL) and hue saturation intensity (HSI) color space models, taking use of image analysis and classification technology, this paper realizes the classification of farmland images in different environments. On the basis of color space, eight color features of the images are extracted. First, we conducted non equal interval quantification and drew the color feature curves, after that, we selected five eigenvectors which can correctly classify the images. Then, principal component analysis (PCA) was used for dimension reduction. Finally, radial basis function (RBF) neural network was joined for the extraction of images in the same scenes and different ones. The performance of the use of multiple color spaces combining with PCA and RBF shows that the average recognition rates of sunny days and cloudy days in the same scenes and different scenes are 100%, 87.36% and 84.58%, 68.11% respectively. Therefore, this method has higher recognition rate than BP neural network.