Abstract
•Determine real bee forage areas characteristics on satellite image segmentation.•Population density, ecological distribution, flowering phenology are determined.•Agriculture satellite image segmentation.•Hopfield artificial neural network model for optimization of segmentation error.•Beekeepers will be guided about actual bee forage areas specific characteristics.
Beekeeping plays an important role in increasing and diversifying the incomes of many rural communities in Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. However, despite the region’s relatively good rainfall, which results in better forage conditions, bees and beekeepers are greatly affected by seasonal shortages of bee forage. Because of these shortages, beekeepers must continually move their colonies in search of better forage. The aim of this paper is to determine the actual bee forage areas with specific characteristics like population density, ecological distribution, flowering phenology based on color satellite image segmentation. Satellite images are currently used as an efficient tool for agricultural management and monitoring. It is also one of the most difficult image segmentation problems due to factors like environmental conditions, poor resolution and poor illumination. Pixel clustering is a popular way of determining the homogeneous image regions, corresponding to the different land cover types, based on their spectral properties. In this paper Hopfield neural network (HNN) is introduced as Pixel clustering based segmentation method for agriculture satellite images.