International Journal of Advances in Science and Technology, Vol. 3, No.

3, 2011

Micro level thematic mapping of land use/land cover using high spatial resolution satellite data (A case study on PNG UNITECH campus)
Sailesh Samanta1, Babita Pal2 and Dilip Kumar Pal3
1

Department of Surveying and Land Studies, PNG University of Technology, Morobe, Lae, 411, PNG rsgis.sailesh@gmail.com
2

PNG University of Technology campus, Morobe, Lae, 411, PNG mundey2@gmail.com

Department of Surveying and Land Studies, PNG University of Technology, Morobe, Lae, 411, PNG dkpal_2000@yahoo.com

Abstract
Land use/land cover information is obtained from satellite imagery by the use of different digital classification algorithms. The common methods of satellite image classification are supervised and unsupervised classification algorithms. These classification methods are faster than traditional image interpretation method. Object based classification algorithms are more powerful than the conventional classification algorithms because they involve classification of the entire object rather than pixel-by-pixel basis. The former has a distinct analogy to the visual interpretation techniques where the shape and texture of the different objects form very important determinants to the ultimate classification output. The study area is the PNG University of Technology campus (UNITECH) in the Lae city under Morobe province of Papua New Guinea. In view of the fact that the common pixel based classification algorithms are found wanting to cope with the prevalent data noise emanating from the high spatial resolution satellite data, three different classification approaches viz. pixel based, object based and vector based are attempted in the present study. Quickbird satellite image of DigitalGlobe (2.4 m multispectral and 0.6 m panchromatic) is used for this purpose. Erdas Imagine 9.2, eCognition Developer 8.64 and ArcGIS 10 software are used to extract land use/land cover information from the high resolution data. Results are compared based on raster and vector output for roads, residential zones, agriculture, vegetation cover and grass cover land. Better result is achieved in the object based approach compared to supervised classification for land cover mapping while the vector based approach is found to be superior for micro level land use mapping to the object based and pixelby-pixel approach.

Keywords: Land use/land cover, Geographical Information System, Small area geography 1. Introduction
Remote Sensing technology is a useful method of surveying, identifying, classifying and monitoring of different Earth resources. The technology entails instantaneous acquisition of data covering a large area at a definite repetitive cycle, which can be used for proper management of different resources. Significant developments in the remote sensing technology especially in terms of spatial resolution have resulted in a high demand for very large-scale maps for various civilian applications like urban or village level land use, cadastral survey, infrastructure and micro level development, utility maps, watershed management as well as thematic map generation (Prasada Raju et al, 2002). The spatial resolution of remotely sensed data has improved in a geometric proportion from 30 m (1984) to better than one meter (2008) corresponding to Landsat5-TM, QuickBird respectively. Methods of multispectral satellite image classification, founded on supervised and unsupervised classification algorithms work on pixel by pixel segmentation. The presumption of such traditional classification methods have been proved true in the case of low resolution satellite image (Lewinski, 2004), whereas it is more elaborate task when working with high resolution satellite image. Segmentation and classification of high resolution imagery is a rather challenging problem owing to inherent data noise that eventually renders it hardly meaningful to carry out this task on a pixel-by-pixel basis. Objects are created in the segmentation process, when the satellite image is subdivided into different groups of pixels

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International Journal of Advances in Science and Technology, Vol. 3, No.3, 2011 which have similar local contrast value. The actual classification process is carried out relatively quickly, because the elements are analyzed as whole objects, not as individual pixel. In pixel-in-polygon analysis, pixel information is already linked to a spatial database built up in a digitizing session. In the spatial database, besides the explicit information, there is still a huge amount of implicit information available (Sester, 2000). Challenges include intricate networks of smaller roads in residential zones and regions of tall/dense tree cover. Observations for these sites are to be assisted in developing a larger-scale analysis plan for Papua New Guinea University of Technology (UNITECH) campus.

2. Study Area and data used

The study area is Papua New Guinea University of Technology campus under Lae city, lying approximately between 6 39 27 S and 6 40 54 S latitudes; 146 59 18 E and 147 00 19 E longitudes covering approximately 2.25 sq km area. For this study, high-resolution satellite imagery has been used as primary input data. Multispectral and panchromatic image of QuickBird satellite are selected for this study. Multispectral image has four spectral bands: 0.45-0.52 m (blue), 0.52-0.60 m (green), 0.63-0.69 m (red) and 0.76-0.90 m (near-IR) with the spatial resolution of 2.4 m. Panchromatic (0.45-0.90 m) image with the spatial resolution of 0.6 m is used for vector based thematic mapping. Toposheet on 1:25,000 and differential global positioning system (DGPS) are used as reference input data for generation of geo-referenced product. All other details of different data are presented herewith in the table 1. Table 1. Data used for the study Sl. No. 1 2 3 4 5 Satellite image QuickBird (Panchromatic) QuickBird (Natural color) QuickBird (Multispectral) Topographical map Cadastral map of campus Resolution/scale 0.6 m 0.6 m 2.4 m 1:25000 1:5000 Year 2010 2010 2010 1976 1980 Source Department of Surveying and Land studies Papua New Guinea University of Technology

3. Methodology
Different land use/land cover classes are easily interpreted from the QuickBird image. They are agriculture plots, plantations, natural vegetations, roads, individual buildings and residences, other built-up areas, sewages, expansive green areas (grass cover lawns), play grounds and open shrub areas. These classes may be further categorized into land cover types through image segmentation (Samanta, 2009). Varied well-known classification algorithms are considered, several of which are selected for this investigation. An overview of these methods is as follows.

3.1. Pixel-by-pixel classification

A spectral-based algorithm utilizes spectral pattern value combinations associated with different feature types, each assigned a unique Digital Number (DN), evaluating spectral reflectance and emittance values present within each pixel to find meaningful patterns. A pixels class is determined from the image datas overall DN value. Both unsupervised and supervised approaches are applied to the QuickBird data based on spectral or pixel-by-pixel based schemes. Three major unsupervised classification methods generally used are k-means, fuzzy c means and isodata techniques. Spectral separation is achieved based on distance-to-mean process in k-means method. Fuzzy c means method is similar to k-means except the former incorporates fuzzy logic in later processing. Pixels are iteratively classified using a minimum spectral distance formula in the isodata method (Lillesand and Kiefer, 2002). Supervised algorithms rely on user-defined training sets defined by Area of Interest (AOI) within the image area whose class membership is known beforehand. Several significant methods of supervised classification include maximum likelihood, minimum distance and mahalanobis distance algorithm. Maximum likelihood approach assumes that statistics for each class in each band are normally distributed. Probabilities that a given pixel belongs to an arbitrary class (Gaussian value distribution) are computed, and the pixel is assigned to the most likely of these within a probability threshold, if specified. Minimum distance approach use the mean vectors of each AOI, euclidean distance from each unknown pixel to the mean vector for a class is computed. Mahalanobis distance method is a directionsensitive distance classifier that retains unique statistics for each class (Hodgson, 1988). At first ground truth data for road networks and GCPs collected by DGPS are used to rectify the QuickBird panchromatic imagery. Secondly

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International Journal of Advances in Science and Technology, Vol. 3, No.3, 2011 QuickBird multispectral image is rectified with reference of the panchromatic imagery. To prepare the land use/land cover data base from QuickBird imagery both the spectral-based classification procedures are examined as part of this investigation in the Erdas Imagine software environment. We initially conducted an unsupervised classification for 50 classes, using the isodata statistical clustering procedure. These classes are thereafter combined to get a set of desired class categories. Using knowledge gained from the unsupervised classification, signature sets are generated for different classes to conduct a supervised maximum likelihood classification.

3.2. Object based classification

The classification and analysis of Earth observation data has evolved predominantly from per-pixel multispectral based approaches. The shortcomings of the latter especially in dealing with the very fine spatial resolution data has led to the development and application of multi scale object-based methods. Object-based image analysis subdivides the image into meaningful homogeneous regions not only based on spectral properties but also on shape, texture, size, and other topological features, and organize them hierarchically as image objects. The segmentation procedure (extraction of the image objects) is controlled by the user-specified scale (size) or resolution of the expected objects. Object-based approaches have been successful for land-use and land-cover classification (Mohan and Rizvi, 2010). Definiens eCognition developer is used to evaluate object-based classification. eCognition has two main types of classifiers, one involving a membership function and the other a nearest neighbor approach. Object-based segmentation involves three methods viz. class-based fusion of image objects, image object extraction and border optimization (Asano et al., 1996). The segmentation of the color images is obtained using multi-resolution transformation process to segregate into homogenous regions. Nearest neighborhood classification technique is finally applied into these homogenous regions taking cognizance of the shape, texture and spectral properties of the regions.

3.3. Vector based approach

Vector based approach is the traditional image interpretation and classification methods and it is very much accurate when working with high resolution satellite image for micro level mapping (Samanta, 2006). All the plot/parcel boundaries are identified from panchromatic image and land use/land cover are identified from the multispectral image of QuickBird. ESRI ArcGIS software is used to process the vector based classification. At first a polygon layer is generated to digitize according to their appearance in the satellite image. Some plot boundaries are not clear (under shadows or under vegetation cover) at the time of digitization process. Previous cadastral map of UNITECH is used as a collateral data set to complete the digitization process. Another polyline layer is generated to digitize all the land use/land cover features. Then using CLEAN followed by BUILD command the polyline layer is converted into polygon coverage. Image interpretation results from QuickBird multispectral and field verification (ground truth) results related to land use/land cover are compared and finalized to introduce into the attribute table of the polygon layer against each polygon.

4. Results and discussion

The analysis of the satellite image is started by conducting a traditional spectral based classification. Different ground cover type and land use classes are generated using unsupervised and supervised classification. They are vegetation cover (natural and plantation), agriculture field, road networks/built-up, settlements, sewage, grass cover field, and open shrubs (figure 1). Object based classification is started by the segmentation of the QuickBird satellite image (figure 2). The scale factor is selected as 35, determining the size of classes. In the object based approach segmentation level-1 (table 2) is utilized for the final classification (figure 2). Eight land cover classes are identified, namely agriculture, vegetation, plantation, road and other built-up, settlements, sewage, grass cover field and shrubs (table 3). The road feature only is modified after following the recoding process on the final object based result. Table 2. eCognition segmentation criterion for QuickBird satellite image Image type Multispectral Panchromatic Segmentati on level Level-1 Level-1 Scale 35 30 Criteria Color Shape 80 % 20 % 20% 80% Shape ratio Compactness Smoothness 0.65 0.35 0.40 0.60 Segmentatio n mode Normal Normal

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Figure 1. Spectral based (supervised) classification of the QuickBird image

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Figure 2. Real color composite (A), Segmentation to identify object border (B) and Object-oriented classification (C) of UNITECH campus using QuickBird image

Finally in the vector based approach eight classes are digitized (figure 3), like agriculture plots, plantations, natural vegetations, roads, individual buildings and residences, play field (tennis & basketball), sewages, expansive green areas (grass cover lawns). Table 3 shows all the land use/land cover classes classified according to different image classification techniques along with their statistics. Table 3. Land use/land cover statistics of different image classification techniques of UNITECH Sl. No. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Land use/land cover categories Area in hectares Object based Vector based 57.32 46.66 10.78 13.21 96.44 98.87 122.20** 28.24 21.97 10.64 14.27 13.90 10.35 12.39 19.32 8.23 8.63 8.95 1.68 1.27 1.26 225.50 225.50 225.50 ** Area (sum) for both grass cover and shrub land

Vegetation Plantation Grass cover land Shrub land Sattlements and buildings Road and other Built-up area Agriculture field Sewage Total Area in hectares * Area (sum) for both vegetation and plantation class

Spectral based 69.93*

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Figure 3. Vector based thematic mapping using QuickBird image

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International Journal of Advances in Science and Technology, Vol. 3, No.3, 2011 The present study is aimed at large scale thematic mapping using finer resolution imagery. In the pixel based classification approach, various land use/land cover features such as individual & row settlements, buildings, roads, plantation and natural vegetation cant be delineated separately. So the natural vegetation and plantation classes are considered as a single vegetation class. Road and other built-up areas are not classified separately and mixed with the settlement class. In the object based classification approach, all eight classes of land use/land cover are easily identified accurately, but relatively low accuracy figures are observed for grass cover land, shrub land and agriculture classes in comparison to other five classes (table 4). Each and every part of the road is not successfully classified by spectral/pixel based, nor is it accomplished by the object based classification, because the road is hidden at places under the tree canopy cover in the study area. Vector based approach takes care of this type of problems in the thematic mapping process with high resolution satellite imagery. Table 4 is showing Accuracy statistics of spectral, object and vector based approaches. To generate spectral and object based classification accuracy, we used 50 ground truth points collected by GPS from the campus. Existing land information system of UNITECH is used as the reference statistics to find the accuracy of the vector based approach. Table 4. Accuracy and error statistics of spectral, object and vector based approach Sl. No. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Land use/land cover categories Spectral based Vegetation Plantation Grass cover land Shrub land Settlements and buildings Road and other Built-up area Agriculture field Sewage Overall accuracy 86.44 84.64 85.33 68.69 89.44 94.60 85.04 86.13* % of accuracy Object based 89.20 92.85 88.87 87.86 98.07 90.25 88.89 98.40 91.80 99.29 95.11 92.44 99.20 94.14 Vector based 94.26 97.85 80.80**

* Accuracy for both vegetation and plantation class

** Accuracy for both grass cover and shrub land

Finally accuracy and error statistics are computed for each approach combination. Summary of accuracy and error statistics of the three classification approaches are given in table 4. Object based image classification approach yielded better results than pixel based approach and experimentally more accurate result is calculated through the vector based approach.

6. Conclusion
Classification of high resolution satellite images using standard per-pixel approach is difficult because of existence of lots of data noise in the high volume of data, i.e. high spatial variability within similar objects arising from the geometry / orientation of the object vis--vis sun angle, varied proportion of the soil background etc. One way to deal with this problem is to reduce the image complexity by dividing it into homogenous segments prior to classification. This has the added advantage that segments can not only be classified on basis of spectral information but on a host of other features such as neighborhood, size, texture and so forth. A major advantage of segmentation process is the use of high-resolution panchromatic images in combination with relatively lower resolution multispectral imagery. This offers a certain advantage with object based classification vs. pixel based method, which often is utilized only in multispectral imagery. A combined approach to classification using object based methods and contextual information available about the image, seems promising and needs further exploration.

Acknowledgements
One of the authors (SS) expresses sincere gratitude to Papua New Guinea University of Technology & Department of Surveying and Land studies for providing Digital Image Interpretation laboratory facility to carry out this research work. The authors are also grateful to the all the academic staff of GIS, Surveying and Land Study section for their suggestions.

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References
[3] Asano T, Chen DZ, Katoh N, and Tokuyama T, Polynomial-time solutions to image segmentation, Proceedings of the 7th Annual SIAM-ACM Conference on Discrete Algorithms, January, pp. 104-113, 1996. [2] eCognition Professional User Guide, <http://www.definiens-imaging.com/down/index.htm> [1] Hodgson M E, Reducing the computational requirements of the minimum-distance classifier, Remote Sensing of Environment, vol. 24, 1988. [1] Lewinski S, and Zaremski K, Example of object-oriented classification performed on high-resolution satellite images, Miscellanea Geographica, vol. 11, pp. 349-358, 2004. [2] Lillesand T, and Kiefer R, Remote Sensing and Image Interpretation, 4th ed., Wiley & Sons, New York, 2002. [1] Mohan B K, and Rizvi I A, Improving the Accuracy of Object Based Supervised Image Classification using Cloud Basis Function Neural Network for High Resolution Satellite Images, International Journal of Image Processing (IJIP), vol. 4, no. 4, pp. 342-353, 2010. [1] Prasada R, Ghosh S, Saibaba J, and Ramachandran R, Large Scale Mapping versus High Resolution Imagery, Indian Cartographer, LSMT-03, pp. 127-134, 2002. [1] Samanta S, Remote Sensing and GIS techniques for land-use/land-cover mapping and issues of flood and its management- a case study on Tapasia mouza in Kaliaghai River Basin, Indian Journal of Geography and Environment, vol. 8 & 9, 2006. [1] Samanta S, Assessment of Surface temperature Using Remote Sensing technology, Papua New Guinea Science and Technology Journal of Research, vol. 1, pp. 12-18, 2009. [1] Sester M, Knowledge acquisition for automatic interpretation of spatial data, International Journal of Geographical Information Science, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 1-24, 2000.

Authors Profile Mr Sailesh Samanta is currently working as a Lecturer in Department of Surveying

and Land Studies, Papua New Guinea University of Technology, Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea. He is having overall teaching experience of 6 years. His major research Interests are in Remote Sensing, GIS, Natural Resource Management and climate.

Ms Babita Pal received her M Sc degree from Vidyasagar University, India in 2007. Her major research Interests are in Remote Sensing, GIS and Natural Resource Management.

Dr D K Pal received his M Sc Ph.D degree from IIT, KGP, India. He is currently
working as a Professor & HOD in Department of Surveying and Land Studies, Papua New Guinea University of Technology, Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea. Formerly: Head Department of Geography & Environment Management; Founder Coordinator & Head Department of Remote Sensing & GIS Vidyasagar University, Midnapore, West Bengal, India, Senior Scientist, Indian Space Research Organization, Govt. of India Over 30 years in the field of Resources management, Land use Studies, Sustainable Development, Disaster Management, Agricultural Chemistry, Soil Science, application of Remote Sensing and GIS in various natural resources.

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