Mapping of Pre-Saharan Vegetal Formation using Landsat TM images

In this paper a method for mapping vegetation patches in semi-arid area is presented. These vegetation spots show specific morphological variations and their exact location is essential for the regional development. The proposed method is based on exploiting spatial and spectral information from Remote sensing data. First, the vegetation spots are emphasized by using the Spectral Similarity Ratio between the pixels of the image and previously defined windows which include samples of the targeted structures. Second, and once vegetation spots are highlighted, they are extracted using the grayscale Hit-or-Miss Transform from mathematical morphology. The method has been applied to map specific pre-Saharan vegetal formation from Landsat Thematic Mapper imagery on Algerian Saharan Atlas.