A multiscale approach to delineate dune-field landscape patches

Abstract Complex dune-field landscape patterns (i.e., dune morphologies and their spatial arrangements) are recognized as indicators of dune self-organization and are required for investigating dune-field landscapes from remotely sensed images. However, dune-field landscape pattern maps are rarely available due to the insufficient attention paid to representing dune-field landscape mosaics and the labor-intensive manual interpretation processes in prior studies. Moreover, automatic or semi-automated dune-field landscape pattern mapping methods are still absent, resulting from a lack of appropriate image units to represent the heterogeneous dune-field landscape patches (DLPs). To address above issues, this study makes the first attempt to apply geoscenes, a new kind of complex units proposed recently, in dune-field landscapes and proposes a multiscale segmentation approach. The proposed approach is able to represent DLPs at multiple scales on images by integrating multisource features (i.e., class-related spatial-pattern features and the line-spatial-pattern features) in a unified segmentation framework. Visual and quantitative assessments of multiscale segmentation results demonstrate that our approach can delineate DLPs effectively. Comparisons among our approach, the multiresolution segmentation in eCognition software and an urban geoscene segmentation approach also reveal the superiority of our approach. This study is hence of great significance for dune-field landscape pattern mapping and offers a potential to be coupled into other landscape investigations.