Abstract
This study investigated whether high-resolution satellite imagery is suitable for preparing a detailed digital forest cover map that discriminates forest cover at the tree species level. First, we tried to find an optimal process for segmenting the high-resolution images using a region-growing method with the scale, color and shape factors in Definiens® Professional 5.0. The image was classified by a traditional, pixel-based, maximum likelihood classification approach using the spectral information of the pixels. The pixels in each segment were reclassified using a segment-based classification (SBC) with a majority rule. Segmentation with strongly weighted color was less sensitive to the scale parameter and led to optimal forest cover segmentation and classification. The pixel-based classification (PBC) suffered from the “salt-and-pepper effect” and performed poorly in the classification of forest cover types, whereas the SBC helped to attenuate the effect and notably improved the classification accuracy. As a whole, SBC proved to be more suitable for classifying and delineating forest cover using high-resolution satellite images.
Highlights
Forest cover maps containing spatial information about tree species, age and diameter class, and density of each forest type are widely used for forest resource management
A number of earlier studies have used coarse spatial resolution satellite imagery for forest cover mapping [2], which allowed the classification of forest cover into broad categories, such as coniferous, deciduous, and mixed forests
Our results demonstrated that segmentation with color parameters from 0.5 to 0.9 and scale parameter from 120 to 200 can lead to optimal forest cover segmentation and classification in central Korea with IKONOS satellite image (Figure 4)
Summary
Forest cover maps containing spatial information about tree species, age and diameter class, and density of each forest type are widely used for forest resource management. Until the middle of the 1990s, the forest cover maps were prepared with a series of complex processes, namely digitization by visual interpretation using a mechanical plotting instrument. This approach is, time-consuming and labor-intensive for making forest cover maps of the entire forested area in South Korea. While broad category forest cover classifications are useful in some instances, they are not suitable for providing detailed forest cover information according to tree species. Since high-resolution multispectral satellite image such as IKONOS and Quickbird image has been commercialized, researchers have classified land cover or land use patterns at a detailed level [11,12,13,14]
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