Incorporation of Digital Elevation Model, Normalized Difference Vegetation Index, and Landsat-8 Data for Land Use Land Cover Mapping

Ancillary data are crucial in land use land cover (LULC) mapping process. This study goal is to investigate if adding Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and digital elevation model (DEM) data as ancillary data to the Landsat-8 spectral imagery (acquired on 14 April 2016) in the support vector machine (SVM) classification process improves LULC mapping accuracy in GuaMusang, Malaysia. ENVI software was used to preprocess a single Landsat-8 image, convert it to reflectance, and calculate NDVI. ASTER-GDEM data were used to generate the DEM. The logical channel method was used to combine NDVI and DEM with Landsat-8 bands and limit the impact of shadows during SVM classification. The SVM accuracy was tested and evaluated on ancillary data and Landsat-8 spectral-based collection. The results revealed that the user's accuracy and producer's accuracy improved by 15.1% and 2.1%, for primary forest and by 17.93% and 28.86% for secondary forest, respectively. The classification reliability of the majority of LULC categories has increased significantly. Compared to SVM spectral-based set, the overall accuracy and kappa coefficient of the SVM ancillary-based set improved by 8.77% and 0.12, respectively. In conclusion, this article demonstrated that integrating DEM and NDVI data improves Landsat-8 image classification precision.