The test area Barrax is located in the southern part of Spain in the area of Albacete, 200km west of Valencia. Barrax is a predominantly agricultural used and situated on the La Mancha plateau (700m asl.). 35% of the agricultural land is continuously irrigated since the area belongs to the driest parts of Europe. Most of the annual rain (400mm in average) occurs in spring and fall

Working plan

Important aspects of the sub-project "Spatial Integration" are investigations about the improvement of the classification accuracy and for the economic optimization of the mapping processes. SAR and optical data should be used in combination in order to stabilize segmentation results and to allow the continuation of mapping results based on change detection. The goal is to investigate the advantages of an area-/segment-related approach for the data interpretation and to find out about other information that can possibly be derived from the combination of different data sets.

Several stages can be defined:

Requirements analysis:

• investigation of the usability of existing commercial software packages and existing DJO software for image classification
  derivation of performance requirements for the structural and geometric integration algorithms that will be developed by the project partners
  

Preparation of a minimal demonstration experiment:

• definition of a set with a minimal number of processing steps for a result with a maximum stability that can distinguish between four to five classes (forest, water bodies, build-up, agriculture/grassland) with a high accuracy
  
• development of an experimental framework for the integration of existing methods as well as new evolving procedures from the project and subsequent modifications of the new procedures

Performance and validation of the minimal demonstration experiment:

• execution of the experiment
  
• validation and determination of criteria for the further development of the experiment
  
• potential adaptation of the main focus
  

Stabilization and extension of the experiment:

• assessment of the stability and specification of the classification result concerning the reliability of the identification of the basic classes and a class extension for specific applications
  

Performance of the full demonstration experiment:

• final stage of the project
  
• clarification of the operating mode
  
• presentation of different specification modes
  
• evaluation concerning reliability of the results, assessment of the base functionality, possibility of extension by additional tools, possibility of set up for special applications, application/completeness of the knowledge base
  
• preparation of base products that can be used for further research purposes