I have a jpg image of a wetland using RGN filter and would like to determine the % "colour" from this image. Any ideas? I'm very much a novice.... Thanks!

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I am wondering if the green in the above image can be expressed as a % using a MatLab function
Currently, I am doing this manually.
I have tried using some simple code but the error I get is "file not found" so not sure how to even start the analysis.
Any assistance would be greatly appreciated :)
  2 Comments
DGM
DGM on 19 Apr 2022
When you say you want a representation of green percentage, do you want a scalar metric for the whole image (the percent of the image that's "green") or do you want a map that represents the percentage of "greenness" at each location?
Is "green" a linear component of a given pixel's color, or is it a category of color?
Consider the tuple [R G B] = [1 1 0]. Is this color
  • 100% green (because the G value is 1)
  • 50% green (because G/(R+G+B) = 1/2)
  • 33% green (because G/3 = 1/3)
  • 100% yellow (because yellow is a distinct category of color)
Steven Lucas
Steven Lucas on 19 Apr 2022
Yes, I would like a map that represents the % of "greeness".
The "green", as shown in the previously attached figure, are mangrove trees....and all the other vegetation has a yellow/orange hue (saltmarsh). Using a "category" of colour makes sense, as the there is a range of "green".
When I compare previous images from previous years I can visually see that the extent of "green" has changed, and the ability to process images and say that "mangrove density has increased/decreased by ?% since 2019"
My thought was to use the MatLab "colour thresholder" but, again, I can't even load an image into the program to run any analysis :(
Hope this makes sense :)

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Accepted Answer

DGM
DGM on 19 Apr 2022
This isn't too far from what Yanqi Liu posted, but I'll throw this out there.
A = imread('marsh.jpg');
A = im2double(A);
[R G B] = imsplit(A);
% this is the amount by which G exceeds any other color
% if a pixel is pure green (i.e. [0 1 0]), the result is 1
% if a pixel has more R or B than G, the result is 0
Gexcess = imclamp(G-max(R,B));
imshow(Gexcess)
% maybe the faintly green areas are aquatic grasses
% or some other things which aren't of interest.
% maybe we're only interested in finding areas which
% are _significantly_ more green ...
thresh = 0.16;
Gmask = Gexcess>thresh;
imshow(Gmask)
% percent of entire image that's above the threshold
globalGpct = mean(Gmask,'all')*100
globalGpct = 7.7428
It's also possible that the faint green layers could be excluded without binarization by using imadjust().
I should note that I get slightly different results when I run this in R2019b. It seems imread() has subtle differences in how it decodes the JPG. I don't know what to think about that. I doubt it would be an issue so long as you're only using one version, but it's not like the format doesn't have other caveats already.
  3 Comments
Steven Lucas
Steven Lucas on 20 Apr 2022
Hi DGM,
I have one last little issue......
In the "imread" line , where to I transfer/cut-paste/import the image to, for MatLab to be able to read it when I run the code? You have "Marsh.jpg", but I'm not sure where it is reading it from.
DGM
DGM on 20 Apr 2022
The above code is using the copy of the image that I attached. It's the same image as the one you posted. I just renamed the file when I downloaded it so that it has a unique name. You can change marsh.jpg to whatever path points to your image file.
Also, I attached imclamp().

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More Answers (1)

yanqi liu
yanqi liu on 19 Apr 2022
yes,sir,may be use color enhance to process,such as
img = imread('https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/uploaded_files/968655/image.jpeg');
R = img(:,:,1);
G = img(:,:,2);
V = rgb2gray(img);
Y = 255-img(:,:,3);
xz_green = imsubtract(G,V);
xz_green = imadjust(xz_green, [0.10 0.30], [0 1]);
figure;
imshow(img); hold on;
h = imshow(xz_green, []);
set(h, 'AlphaData',0.8)

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