Classification of Tundra Vegetation in the Krkonoše Mts. National Park Using APEX, AISA Dual and Sentinel-2A Data

Abstract

The aim of this study was to evaluate and compare suitability of aerial hyperspectral data (AISA Dual and APEX sensors) and Sentinel-2A data for classification of tundra vegetation cover in the Krkonoše Mts. National Park. We compared classification results (accuracy, maps) of pixel-based (Maximum Likelihood, Suport Vector Machine and Neural Net) and object-based approaches. The best classification results (overall accuracy 84.3%, Kappa coefficient = 0.81) were achieved for AISA Dual data using per-pixel SVM classifier for 40 PCA bands. The best classification results of APEX though were only 1.7 percentage points lower. To get comparable results for Sentinel-2A classification legend had to be simplified. With the simplified legend the accuracy using MLC classifier reached 77.7%.

Keywords

• Tundra vegetation
• The Krkonoše Mountains
• Per-pixel classification
• Object-based classification
• Hyperspectral data
• Sentiel-2A