Modified Hierarchical k-Nearest Neighbor Method with Application to Land-cover Classification

In this paper, we propose a land-cover classification method based on a modified hierarchical k-nearest neighbor (MHkNN) algorithm to achieve a high classification accuracy. The proposed method introduces a reliability measure for each training sample, which is defined as confidence in the sample belonging to each of the considered classes. The method performs the majority voting considering not only the number of the training samples, but also their reliabilities. The classification performance of the proposed method is compared to that of the conventional land-cover classification methods. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by applying it to real remote sensing images.