Evaluation of radiometric resolution on land use/land cover mapping in an agricultural area

Motivated by the increasing availability and importance of high radiometric resolution remote sensing data, this study aims to determine whether current generation high radiometric resolution remote sensing data could be used accurately for land use/land cover classification in place of traditional moderate radiometric resolution multispectral data. A comparative study has been carried out to evaluate the utility of the simulated 12-bit LISS-III sensor compared with that of the original 7-bit LISS-III sensor for land use/land cover classification. It has been found that there is a small increase of 3% in overall accuracy by using the high radiometric resolution (12-bit) LISS-III data over the moderate radiometric resolution (7-bit) LISS-III data for land use/land cover classification. A 4-6% difference in classification accuracy of simulated LISS-III for cotton, chillies, black gram, and sugar cane indicates the usefulness of high radiometric resolution data for ground classes that are more heterogeneous within the same class. This study suggests that high radiometric resolution satellite data may not be a requisite for accurate land use/land cover mapping, whereas the spectral bandwidth, band placement, and method of classification parameters may be more important.