SO–CNN based urban functional zone fine division with VHR remote sensing image

Abstract Functional zone reflects city's spatial structures, and as a carrier of social and economic activities, it is of critical significance to urban management, resource allocation and planning. However, most researches on functional zone division are based on a large spatial scale such as blocks or other scales larger than it. Aiming at a subtle fine functional result, the concept of Super Object (SO) was especially explained, also a Super Object - Convolutional Neural Network (SO–CNN) based urban functional zone fine division method with very high resolution (VHR) remote sensing image was proposed. The original image was firstly segmented into different SOs which correspond to the basic functional zone units in geography. A random point generation algorithm was used to generate the voting points for functional zone category identification, and then a trained CNN model was employed to assign functional attributes to those voting points. Then a statistical method was involved to count the frequency of the classified voting points of different functional attributes in each basic functional zone units. By voting process, the functional attribute with the highest frequency was assigned to the basic functional zone unit, which corrected the misclassification results of CNN to some extent. This paper also explored the scale effect of the SO on the final functional zone classification result from two aspects, spatial scale of SO and the sampling window size of CNN model. Because of the natural differences between functional zone division and land cover classification, region based overall accuracy assessment method was used to evaluate functional zone division result. Compared with other methods, SO–CNN method can generate higher accuracy and subtle result, based on which larger spatial scale results can be available by scaling-up, so SO–CNN method plays a great significant role on small scale functional space structure research.