LAND COVER CLASSIFICATION PERFORMANCE OF MULTISPECTRAL RTK UAVs

Abstract. Unmanned air vehicle (UAV) became an alternative airborne remote sensing technique, due to providing very high resolution and low cost spatial data and short processing time. Particularly, optical UAVs are frequently utilized in various applications such as mapping, agriculture, and forestry. Especially for precise agriculture purposes, the UAVs were equipped with multispectral cameras which enables to classify land cover easily. In this study, the land cover classification potential of DJI Phantom IV Multispectral, one of the most preferred agricultural UAVs in the world, was investigated using spectral angle mapper, minimum distance and maximum likelihood pixel-based classification techniques and object-based classification. In the investigation, a part of Gebze Technical University (GTU) Northern Campus, includes a large variety of land cover classes, was selected as the study area. The UAV aerial photos were achieved from 70 m flight altitude and processed using structure from motion (SfM)-based image matching software Agisoft Metashape. The pixel-based and object-based land cover classification processes were completed with ENVI and eCognition software respectively. 16 independent land cover classes were classified and the results demonstrated that the accuracies are 73.46% in spectral angle mapper, 75.27% in minimum distance and 93.56% in maximum likelihood pixel-based classification techniques and 90.09% in nearest neighbour object-based classification.