Land cover classification is the core of converting satellite imagery to available geographic data.However,spectral signatures do not always provide enough information in classification decisions.Thus,the application of multi-source data becomes necessary.This paper presents an evidential reasoning (ER) approach to incorporate Landsat TM imagery,altitude and slope data.Results show that multi-source data contribute to the classification accuracy achieved by the ER method,whereas play a negative role to that derived by maximum likelihood classifier (MLC).In comparison to the results derived based on TM imagery alone,the overall accuracy rate of the ER method increases by 7.66% and that of the MLC method decreases by 8.35% when all data sources (TM plus altitude and slope) are accessible.The ER method is regarded as a better approach for multi-source image classification.In addition,the method produces not only an accurate classification result,but also the uncertainty which presents the inherent difficulty in classification decisions.The uncertainty associated to the ER classification image is evaluated and proved to be useful for improved classification accuracy.
The main objective of this research is to determine the capacity of land cover classification combining spec- tral and textural features of Landsat TM imagery with ancillary geographical data in wetlands of the Sanjiang Plain, Heilongjiang Province, China. Semi-variograms and Z-test value were calculated to assess the separability of grey-level co-occurrence texture measures to maximize the difference between land cover types. The degree of spatial autocorrelation showed that window sizes of 3×3 pixels and 11×11 pixels were most appropriate for Landsat TM im- age texture calculations. The texture analysis showed that co-occurrence entropy, dissimilarity, and variance texture measures, derived from the Landsat TM spectrum bands and vegetation indices provided the most significant statistical differentiation between land cover types. Subsequently, a Classification and Regression Tree (CART) algorithm was applied to three different combinations of predictors: 1) TM imagery alone (TM-only); 2) TM imagery plus image texture (TM+TXT model); and 3) all predictors including TM imagery, image texture and additional ancillary GIS in- formation (TM+TXT+GIS model). Compared with traditional Maximum Likelihood Classification (MLC) supervised classification, three classification trees predictive models reduced the overall error rate significantly. Image texture measures and ancillary geographical variables depressed the speckle noise effectively and reduced classification error rate of marsh obviously. For classification trees model making use of all available predictors, omission error rate was 12.90% and commission error rate was 10.99% for marsh. The developed method is portable, relatively easy to im- plement and should be applicable in other settings and over larger extents.
NA XiaodongZHANG ShuqingZHANG HuaiqingLI XiaofengYU HuanLIU Chunyue
