Integrating TM and ancillary geographical data with classification trees for land cover classification of marsh area

The main objective of this research is to determine the capacity of land cover classification combining spectral and textural features of Landsat TM imagery with ancillary geographical data in wetlands of the Sanjiang Plain, Heilongjiang Province, China. Semi-variograms and Z-test value were calculated to assess the separability of grey-level co-occurrence texture measures to maximize the difference between land cover types. The degree of spatial autocorrelation showed that window sizes of 3×3 pixels and 11×11 pixels were most appropriate for Landsat TM image texture calculations. The texture analysis showed that co-occurrence entropy, dissimilarity, and variance texture measures, derived from the Landsat TM spectrum bands and vegetation indices provided the most significant statistical differentiation between land cover types. Subsequently, a Classification and Regression Tree (CART) algorithm was applied to three different combinations of predictors: 1) TM imagery alone (TM-only); 2) TM imagery plus image texture (TM+TXT model); and 3) all predictors including TM imagery, image texture and additional ancillary GIS information (TM+TXT+GIS model). Compared with traditional Maximum Likelihood Classification (MLC) supervised classification, three classification trees predictive models reduced the overall error rate significantly. Image texture measures and ancillary geographical variables depressed the speckle noise effectively and reduced classification error rate of marsh obviously. For classification trees model making use of all available predictors, omission error rate was 12.90% and commission error rate was 10.99% for marsh. The developed method is portable, relatively easy to implement and should be applicable in other settings and over larger extents.