PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENT OF CLASSIFICATION ALGORITHMS FOR LANDUSE / LANDCOVER CHANGE USING SENTINEL 2 DATA – A CASE STUDY OF TIRUPPUR

Abstract. In the history of mankind, one of the vibrant geographical phenomena is urbanization. The urbanization process is characterized by the expansion of the city from the core to peripheral areas which includes economic development, social, political forces and population density. Very rapid urbanization in the highly populated country like India, which changes natural land cover into urban land use, which is unavoidable. However, the study region Tiruppur is known as the knitwear capital of India that induces urban development in the region which results in the modification of the natural land cover. For understating the interaction between the natural landscape and human activities, land use and land cover (LULC) is considered as the important indicator. Research on land-use and land cover changes using remote sensing technology has a long history to evident. The advancement in the Remote Sensing and GIS techniques provide the fine resolution of data sets to proceed. Sentinel-2B imagery was chosen for this study for two main reasons one is that compare to Landsat imagery it has a high spatial resolution of 10 m and its radiometry includes three vegetation red edge bands. These two characteristics make the Sentinel-2B data appealing for LULC mapping. Different types of classification algorithms have been used to perform land use and land cover mapping. The study aims to create land use and land cover classification by making a comparison between different algorithms in Tiruppur by using Sentinel-2B satellite imagery. The commonly known classification algorithms, K-means, IsoData, support vector machines (SVMs), and maximum likelihood (ML) classification are adopted for investigation. This is followed by the selection of training pixels from the remaining classes to perform and compare different supervised learning algorithms for the first- and second-level classification in terms of accuracy rates. Accuracy was assessed through metrics derived from an error matrix, but primarily overall accuracy and kappa coefficient was used in allocating algorithm hierarchy. Finally, after the comparison, the highly accurate algorithm was suggested for the mapping of urban areas. The highest overall accuracy and kappa coefficient was produced by support vector machine (SVM) is due to the algorithm’s relatively small number of complex decision boundaries. The results are helpful to understand the performance of the classification algorithm for the future studies.