Classification of land cover from remote sensing images using morphological linear contact distributions and rough sets

Abstract

Remote sensing image classification plays an essential role in computer vision and image processing to address the problems in the areas of agriculture, forest monitoring, urban development, environment protection, etc. A lot of literature is available on remote sensing image classification. But, it is still a research task even today because of the multitude of problems. RTBFCA (Rough Texture Based Features Classification Algorithm), a new classification algorithm has been proposed in this paper. This paper aims at classifying the remote sensing images into various cover types using mathematical morphology and rough sets. Morphological texture features (linear contact distributions) along with first order statistics are used to identify the pixels of various classes and the concepts of lower and upper approximations of rough sets are used for clustering the features of the pixels and then are finally classified to display the classified image. The proposed method was tested on Google Earth images and is able to classify even various crops patterns of a land cover image. The algorithm is compared with other algorithms like ”GLCM with rough sets”, ”intensity values with rough sets” and with ”linear contact distributions with rough sets”.