COMPARISON OF SUPERVISED CLASSIFICATION TECHNIQUES WITH ALOS PALSAR SENSOR FOR ROORKEE REGION OF UTTARAKHAND, INDIA

Abstract. The Advanced Land Observing Satellite (ALOS) is developed by the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) which was launched in the year 2006 for the Earth observation and exploration purpose. The ALOS was carrying PRISM, AVNIR-2 and PALSAR sensors for this purpose. PALSAR is L-Band synthetic aperture radar (SAR). The PALSAR sensor is designed in a way that it can work in all weather conditions with a resolution of 10 meters. In this research work we have made an investigation on the accuracy obtained from the various supervised classification techniques. We have compared the accuracy obtained by classifying the ALOS PALSAR data of the Roorkee region of Uttarakhand, India. The training ROI’S (Region of Interest) are created manually with the assistance of ArcGIS Earth and for the testing purpose, we have used the Global positioning system (GPS) coordinates of the region. Supervised classification techniques included in this comparison are Parallelepiped classification (PC), Minimum distance classification (MDC), Mahalanobis distance classification (MaDC), Maximum likelihood classification (MLC), Spectral angle mapper (SAM), Spectral information divergence (SID) and Support vector machine (SVM). Later, through the post classification confusion matrix accuracy assessment test is performed and the corresponding value of the kappa coefficient is obtained. In the result, we have concluded MDC as best in term of overall accuracy with 82.3634% and MLC with a kappa value of 0.7591. Finally, a peculiar relationship is developed in between classification accuracy and kappa coefficient.