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Title: A detailed comparison of backpropagation neural network and maximum-likelihood classifiers for urban land use classification

Journal Article · · IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1109/36.406684· OSTI ID:136699
;  [1]
  1. Univ. of Arizona, Tucson, AZ (United States). Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering

A detailed comparison of the backpropagation neural network and maximum-likelihood classifiers for urban land use classification is presented in this paper. Landsat Thematic Mapper images of Tucson, Arizona, and Oakland, California, were used for this comparison. For the Tucson image, the percentage of matching pixels in the two classification maps was only 64.5%, while for the Oakland image it was 83.3%. Although the test site accuracies of the two Tucson maps were similar,the map produced by the neural network was visually more accurate; this difference is explained by examining class regions and density plots in the decision space and the continuous likelihood values produced by both classifiers. For the Oakland scene, the two maps were visually and numerically similar, although the neural network was superior in suppression of mixed pixel classification errors. From this analysis, the authors conclude that the neural network is more robust to training site heterogeneity and the use of class labels for land use that are mixtures of land cover spectral signatures. The differences between the two algorithms may be viewed, in part, as the differences between nonparametric (neural network) and parametric (maximum-likelihood) classifiers. Computationally, the backpropagation neural network is at a serious disadvantage to maximum-likelihood, taking nearly an order of magnitude more computing time when implemented n a serial workstation.

OSTI ID:
136699
Journal Information:
IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, Vol. 33, Issue 4; Other Information: PBD: Jul 1995
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English