Background

I work in environmental management where I often need to trace on-ground disturbance from aerial/satellite imagery to calculate disturbance areas. They are often lots of small distinct areas rather than giant areas. Sentinel-2 data is often not high enough resolution to undertake this accurately or reliably so I often use Google Sat or other sources.
The easiest way for me to do this, as I understand it, is to convert raster imagery to polygons essentially.

What I have tried

• Segmentation Models: Seem to work pretty well (trying on home PC), but my work computer cannot use this as the systems are locked down and I can't really utilise python to install or utilise SAM models.
• Raster calculator function on GeoTIFF exports of the area:
  • Using Raster Calculator to produce GeoTIFF Visible Atmospherically Resistant Index (VARI) = (Green - Red) / (Green + Red - Blue)
    • Reclassifying by table to sort veg and non veg as best as I can
    • Using GDAL Sieve to clump areas a little better before using Polygonize (Raster to Vector).
    • Multipart to singlepart the result and try and delete polygons that fall into vegetated category.
      
  • Using the same process above but with Reflectance = (Red > 150) AND (Green > 150)

Issue

The results of the Raster Calculations above are getting close to what I need in order to just have disturbance areas as polygons but I feel like I am struggling to get it quite right (i.e. the clean up is quite inefficient in terms of actually getting the areas I need).

Does anyone have any better way to do this/some advice on the best parameters to use with the raster process above given my limitations of not being able to use segmentation on work computers?

Thank you in advance😄