Object-based image analysis of suburban landscapes using Landsat-8 imagery

ABSTRACT

Many experiments of object-based image analysis have been conducted in remote sensing classification. However, they commonly used high-resolution imagery and rarely focused on suburban area. In this research, with the Landsat-8 imagery, classification of a suburban area via the object-based approach is achieved using four classifiers, including decision tree (DT), support vector machine (SVM), random trees (RT), and naive Bayes (NB). We performed feature selection at different sizes of segmentation scale and evaluated the effects of segmentation and tuning parameters within each classifier on classification accuracy. The results showed that the influence of shape on overall accuracy was greater than that of compactness, and a relatively low value of shape should be set with increasing scale size. For DT, the optimal maximum depth usually varied from 5 to 8. For SVM, the optimal gamma was less than or equal to 10⁻², and its optimal C was greater than or equal to 10². For RT, the optimal active variables was less than or equal to 4, and the optimal maximum tree number was greater than or equal to 30. Furthermore, although there was no statistically significant difference between some classification results produced using different classifiers, SVM has a slightly better performance.

KEYWORDS:

• Land cover
• remote sensing
• object-based
• classifier
• feature selection

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by National Key R&D Program of China [2017YFB0503805]; Special Project on High Resolution of Earth Observation System for Major Function Oriented Zones Planning [00-Y30B14-9001-14/16]. Sincere thanks are given for the comments and contributions of anonymous reviewers and members of the editorial team.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Key R&D Program of China [2017YFB0503805]; Special Project on High Resolution of Earth Observation System for Major Function Oriented Zones Planning [00-Y30B14-9001-14/16].