A textural approach for land cover classification of remotely sensed image

Abstract

Texture features play a vital role in land cover classification of remotely sensed images. Local binary pattern (LBP) is a texture model that has been widely used in many applications. Many variants of LBP have also been proposed. Most of these texture models use only two or three discrete output levels for pattern characterization. In the case of remotely sensed images, texture models should be capable of capturing and discriminating even minute pattern differences. So a multivariate texture model is proposed with four discrete output levels for effective classification of land covers. Remotely sensed images have fuzzy land covers and boundaries. Support vector machine is highly suitable for classification of remotely sensed images due to its inherent fuzziness. It can be used for accurate classification of pixels falling on the fuzzy boundary of separation of classes. In this work, texture features are extracted using the proposed multivariate descriptor, MDLTP/MVAR that uses multivariate discrete local texture pattern (MDLTP) supplemented with multivariate variance (MVAR). The classification accuracy of the classified image obtained is found to be 93.46 %.