Converting local spectral and spatial information from a priori classifiers into contextual knowledge for impervious surface classification

Abstract A classification model was demonstrated that explored spectral and spatial contextual information from previously classified neighbors to improve classification of remaining unclassified pixels. The classification was composed by two major steps, the a priori and the a posteriori classifications. The a priori algorithm classified the less difficult image portion. The a posteriori classifier operated on the more challenging image parts and strived to enhance accuracy by converting classified information from the a priori process into specific knowledge. The novelty of this work relies on the substitution of image-wide information with local spectral representations and spatial correlations, in essence classifying each pixel using exclusively neighboring behavior. Furthermore, the a posteriori classifier is a simple and intuitive algorithm, adjusted to perform in a localized setting for the task requirements. A 2001 and a 2006 Landsat scene from Central New York were used to assess the performance on an impervious classification task. The proposed method was compared with a back propagation neural network. Kappa statistic values in the corresponding applicable datasets increased from 18.67 to 24.05 for the 2006 scene, and from 22.92 to 35.76 for the 2001 scene classification, mostly correcting misclassifications between impervious and soil pixels. This finding suggests that simple classifiers have the ability to surpass complex classifiers through incorporation of partial results and an elegant multi-process framework.