SUMMARY
Image processing is a powerful tool apt to perform selective data extraction from high-content images. In agricultural studies, image processing has been applied to different scopes, among them the classification of crop shelters has been recently considered especially in areas where there is a lack of public control in the building activity. The application of image processing to crop-shelter feature recognition make it possible to automatically produce thematic maps that constitute a basic knowledge for local authorities to cope with environmental problems and for technicians to be used in their planning activity. This paper reviews the authors’ experience in the definition of methodologies, based on the main image processing methods, for crop-shelter feature extraction from aerial digital images. Some experiences of pixel-based and object-oriented methods are described and discussed. The results show that the methodology based on object-oriented methods improves crop-shelter classification and reduces computational time, compared to pixel-based methodologies.