A fit-for-purpose algorithm for environmental monitoring based on maximum likelihood, support vector machine and random forest

Abstract

Due to concerns of recent earth climate changes such as an increase of earth surface temperature and monitoring its effect on earth surface, environmental monitoring is a necessity. Environmental change monitoring in earth sciences needs land use land cover change (LULCC) modelling as a key factor to investigate impact of climate change phenomena such as droughts and floods on earth surface land cover. There are several free and commercial multi/hyper spectral data sources of Earth Observation (EO) satellites including Landsat, Sentinel and Spot. In this paper, for land use land cover modelling (LULCM), image classification of Landsat 8 using several mathematical and machine learning algorithms including Support Vector Machine (SVM), Random Forest (RF), Maximum Likelihood (ML) and a combination of SVM, ML and RF as a fit-for-purpose algorithm are implemented in R programming language and compared in terms of overall accuracy for image classification.