INVESTIGATIONS ON THE EFFECT OF HD PROCESSING IN LAND COVER CLASSIFICATION

Abstract

The requirement of automated Land Use/Land Cover (LULC) classification has arisen in ecosystem related applications, such as natural hazard assessments, urban and rural area planning, natural resource management, etc. The data source and the classification method used in the production of LULC maps depend on the study area size and the location, and also determined by taking the time and cost into account. Recently, MAXAR Technologies announced a new product, High Definition (HD) with 15 cm resolution, which is obtained by post-processing of images with 30 cm Ground Sampling Distance (GSD). The post-processing employs machine learning methods. On the other side, the effect of HD processing on the image quality, and the usability of such products in various applications are still needed to be investigated. In this study, the influence of HD processing algorithm on LULC classification results was investigated by using 15 cm HD and 30 cm resolution images provided by MAXAR. By using the Random Forest (RF) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) methods in two different study areas, image classification was performed to detect water, vegetation, asphalt road, building, shadow, agriculture and barren land classes. The results show that in HD products, the edges of objects were sharper, whereas the classification noise was higher inside agricultural fields. Considering the overall results, it can be concluded that with the use of HD products in urban areas, improved LULC maps can be obtained.