Fluvial gravel bar mapping with spectral signal mixture analysis

Abstract

The paper presents a method for mapping fluvial gravel bars based on Sentinel-2 and Landsat imagery. The proposed method therefore uses spectral signal mixture analysis (SSMA) because its results allow the development of land cover fraction maps for surface water, gravel, and vegetation. The method is validated on a spatially heterogeneous mountainous area in the upper Soča river basin in north-west Slovenia, Central Europe. Unmixing results in highly accurate fraction maps with MAE of around 0.1. Gravel fractions are mapped the most accurately, indicating that the approach can be used successfully for fluvial gravel bar mapping. Endmember sets selected automatically perform slightly worse (MAE higher by at most 0.05) than sets selected manually based on high resolution reference data. Both Sentinel-2 and Landsat imagery can be used for accurate mapping with differences between the two remote sensing systems within 0.05 MAE. For the study area, the SSMA-based soft classification method is more accurate for land cover mapping than a Spectral Angle Mapping-based hard classification. The method is promising for an effective use in other cases where highly accurate subpixel information is needed, because it is able to detect small-scale changes that could go unnoticed with hard classification mapping.

Keywords

• geomorphology
• rivers
• sub-pixel
• alpine
• multispectral data
• mapping