Urban land-use classification using variogram based analysis with an aerial photograph.pdf

Abstract In this study, a variogram-based texture analysis was tested for classifying detailed urban land-use classes, such as mobile home, single-family house, multi-family house, industrial, and commercial from a digital color infrared aerial photograph. Spectral classification was first carried out to separate the building class from non-building classes. Then, a building-presence binary image was generated so that building pixels were assigned a value of “1” and non-building pixels were assigned a value of “0.” Multiple texture bands were further generated employing a vari- ogram-based texture analysis and used for land-use classifi- cation. The generation of the building presence binary image allowed us not only to fully explore the capability of variogram-based analysis on spatial pattern detection, but also to prevent the variogram-based analysis from being disturbed by the natural fluctuation of spectral signals. The result from using a mosaic test image was considered satisfactory with a kappa coefficient of 0.72. Introduction The urban environment contains a variety of spectrally different materials, such as soil, grass, trees, plastic, metal, shingle wood, and concrete. Traditional pixel-based spec- tral classifications assign each pixel to one of the candidate classes based on its brightness value, which indicates the spectral reflectance of the earth surface. However, using spectral information alone is not sufficient for classifica- tion of spectrally heterogeneous land-use classes, such as mobile home, single-family house, multi-family house, industrial, and commercial. Therefore, texture information from spatial patterns is often used to complement spectral information. New texture bands, in addition to original spectral bands, may be used together in classification. Each pixel in each of the texture bands is assigned a digi- tal value as a reflection of the spatial variation of pixel brightness in the neighborhood in a sense of describing local text