Using vegetation reflectance variability for species level classification of hyperspectral data

A study was conducted to investigate whether reflectance data from vegetation in a tropical forest canopy could be used for species level discrimination. Reflectance spectra of 11 species were analysed at the scale of the leaf, branch, tree and species. To enhance separation of species-of-interest spectra from the other spectra in the data, the variation in reflectance values for the species-of-interest were used to create a characteristic spectral shape. With a simple algorithm, the resultant shape-space was used as a data filter that correctly discriminated against 94% of the non-species-of-interest trees.