Land-cover classification of an intra-urban environment using high-resolution images and object-based image analysis

Detailed, up-to-date information on intra-urban land cover is important for urban planning and management. Differentiation between permeable and impermeable land, for instance, provides data for surface run-off estimates and flood prevention, whereas identification of vegetated areas enables studies of urban micro-climates. In place of maps, high-resolution images, such as those from the satellites IKONOS II, Quickbird, Orbview and WorldView II, can be used after processing. Object-based image analysis (OBIA) is a well-established method for classifying high-resolution images of urban areas. Despite the large number of previous studies of OBIA in the context of intra-urban analysis, there are many issues in this area that are still open to discussion and resolution. Intra-urban analysis using OBIA can be lengthy and complex because of the processing difficulties related to image segmentation, the large number of object attributes to be resolved and the many different methods needed to classify various image objects. To overcome these issues, we performed an experiment consisting of land-cover mapping based on an OBIA approach using an IKONOS II image of a southern sector of Sao Jose dos Campos city (covering an area of 12 km(2) with 50 neighbourhoods), which is located in Sao Paulo State in south-eastern Brazil. This area contains various occupation and land-use patterns, and it therefore contains a wide range of intra-urban targets. To generate the land-cover map, we proposed an OBIA-based processing framework that combines multi-resolution segmentation, data mining and hierarchical network techniques. The intra-urban land-cover map was then evaluated through an object-based error matrix, and classification accuracy indices were obtained. The final classification, with 11 classes, achieved a global accuracy of 71.91%.