Object-based image analysis for mapping geomorphic zones of coral reefs in the Xisha Islands, China

Mapping regional spatial patterns of coral reef geomorphology provides the primary information to understand the constructive processes in the reef ecosystem. However, this work is challenged by the pixel-based image classification method for its comparatively low accuracy. In this paper, an object-based image analysis(OBIA)method was presented to map intra-reef geomorphology of coral reefs in the Xisha Islands, China using Landsat 8satellite imagery. Following the work of the Millennium Coral Reef Mapping Project, a regional reef class hierarchy with ten geomorphic classes was first defined. Then, incorporating the hierarchical concept and integrating the spectral and additional spatial information such as context, shape and contextual relationships, a large-scale geomorphic map was produced by OBIA with accuracies generally more than 80%. Although the robustness of OBIA has been validated in the applications of coral reef mapping from individual reefs to reef system in this paper, further work is still required to improve its transferability.