Land Use Classification using Support Vector Machine and Maximum Likelihood Algorithms by Landsat 5 TM Images

Abstract

Nowadays, remote sensing images have been identified and exploited as the latest information to study land cover and land uses. These digital images are of significant importance, since they can present timely information, and capable of providing land use maps. The aim of this study is to create land use classification using a support vector machine (SVM) and maximum likelihood classifier (MLC) in Qazvin, Iran, by TM images of the Landsat 5 satellite. In the pre-processing stage, the necessary corrections were applied to the images. In order to evaluate the accuracy of the 2 algorithms, the overall accuracy and kappa coefficient were used. The evaluation results verified that the SVM algorithm with an overall accuracy of 86.67 % and a kappa coefficient of 0.82 has a higher accuracy than the MLC algorithm in land use mapping. Therefore, this algorithm has been suggested to be applied as an optimal classifier for extraction of land use maps due to its higher accuracy and better consistency within the study area. doi:10.14456/WJST.2015.33

Keywords

• Remote sensing
• satellite
• overall accuracy
• kappa coefficient