Land cover classification with multispectral LiDAR based on multi-scale spatial and spectral feature selection

Abstract

The distribution of land cover has an important impact on climate, environment, and public policy planning. The Optech Titan multispectral LiDAR system provides new opportunities and challenges for land cover classification, but the better application of spectral and spatial information of multispectral LiDAR data is a problem to be solved. Therefore, we propose a land cover classification method based on multi-scale spatial and spectral feature selection. The public data set of Tobermory Port collected by the Optech Titan multispectral airborne laser scanner was used as research data, and the data was manually divided into eight categories. The method flow is divided into four steps: neighborhood point selection, spatial–spectral feature extraction, feature selection, and classification. First, the K-nearest neighborhood is used to select the neighborhood points for the multispectral LiDAR point cloud data. Additionally, the spatial and spectral features under the multi-scale neighborhood (K = 20, 50, 100, 150) are extracted. The Equalizer Optimization algorithm is used to perform feature selection on multi-scale neighborhood spatial–spectral features, and a feature subset is obtained. Finally, the feature subset is input into the support vector machine (SVM) classifier for training. Using only small training samples (about 0.5% of the total data) to train the SVM classifier, 91.99% overall accuracy (OA), 93.41% average accuracy (AA) and 0.89 kappa coefficient were obtained in study area. Compared with the original information’s classification result, the OA, AA and kappa coefficient increased by 15.66%, 8.7% and 0.19, respectively. The results show that the constructed spatial–spectral features and the application of the Equalizer Optimization algorithm for feature selection are effective in land cover classification with Titan multispectral LiDAR point data.