Extracting a very particular color from an orthomosaic and eventually making a vector

Question

I'm working on an orthomosaic and there is a particular weed species that is flowering at the moment and I need to isolate it and map it out. It's a yellowish green and is obvious in the ortho. I know there must be a way to isolate it so I can map it better.

I've tried the raster calculator with the following expression:

Narlu Orthomosaic 26-06-21@1"=190-210 AND "Narlu Orthomosaic 26-06-21@2"=210-225 AND "Narlu Orthomosaic 26-06-21@3"=78-86

I've made this a range of colors to try and best capture the range that this flower reflects.

The information shown when I use the "information" pointer is the following:

• Band 1 = 210
• Band 2 = 218
• Band 3 = 83

What am I doing wrong as the other answers on this site don't seem to cover this type of question well.

I'll eventually make a vector shapefile layer out of it.

Any help would be great!

Answer 1

your syntax is wrong, use something like:

(("Narlu Orthomosaic 26-06-21@1">=190) AND ("Narlu Orthomosaic 26-06-21@1"<=210)) 
AND (("Narlu Orthomosaic 26-06-21@2">=210) AND ("Narlu Orthomosaic 26-06-21@2"<=225)) 
AND (("Narlu Orthomosaic 26-06-21@3">=78) AND ("Narlu Orthomosaic 26-06-21@3"<=86)) 

Answer 2

Create a new raster in Raster Calculator - call it MASK

("Narlu Orthomosaic 26-06-21@1">=190) *("Narlu Orthomosaic 26-06-21@1"<=210) * ("Narlu Orthomosaic 26-06-21@2">=210) *("Narlu Orthomosaic 26-06-21@2"<=225) * ("Narlu Orthomosaic 26-06-21@3">=78) * ("Narlu Orthomosaic 26-06-21@3"<=86) 

This will give you a single band raster as a mask - it will be 1 when you have the right colour, and 0 otherwise. You can convert that to vector.

You can also apply it as a mask to the original data to make 3 bands, band by band, again in the Raster Calculator:

"Narlu Orthomosaic 26-06-21@1" * Mask@1
"Narlu Orthomosaic 26-06-21@2" * Mask@1
"Narlu Orthomosaic 26-06-21@3" * Mask@1

This creates three more rasters. Combine these to a new raster file with Raster-Miscellaneous-Merge, placing each file into a separate band.

Set the transparency of the new raster file to 100% for pixels with value 0. You should then see only your weed plantation. This can be done interactively in the Layer Styling Panel.

There are probably more elegant ways of doing this. There may be plugins that do it all.