IMPROVING CLASSIFICATION OF MULTISPECTRAL IMAGES BASED ON SELECTED RELATIONS

Abstract. A novel classification technique based on definition of unique spectral relations (such as slopes among spectral bands) for all land cover types named (SSF Significant Spectral Features) is presented in the article.

A large slopes combination between spectral band pairs is calculated and spectral characterizations that emphasizes the best spectral land cover separation is sought. Increasing in dimensionality of spectral representations is balanced by the simplicity of calculations. The technique has been examined on data acquired by a flown hyperspectral scanner (AISA). The spectral data was narrowed into the equivalent 8 world-view2 channels. The research area was in the city of “Hadera”, Israel, which included 10 land cover types in an urban area, open area and road infrastructure. The comparison between the developed SSF technique and common techniques such as: SVM (Support Vector Machine) and ML (Maximum Likelihood) has shown a clear advantage over ML technique, while produced similar results as SVM. The poorest results of using SSF technique was achieved in an herbaceous area (70%). However, the simplicity of the method, the well-defined parameters it produces for interpreting the results, makes it intuitive over using techniques such as SVM, which is considered as a not explicit classifier.