Mapping land cover and land use from object-based classification: an example from a complex agricultural landscape

From its inception, land-use and land-cover mapping have been major themes in remote-sensing research and applications. Although frequently considered together, land use and land cover (LULC) are defined differently, with land use referring to the economic function of the Earth's surface and land cover to its natural or engineered biophysical cover. Land cover can be observed directly using remote sensing, but land use must be inferred from the cover type. In this study, we test whether object-based image analysis (OBIA) can improve the land-cover and land-use classification in a complex agricultural landscape located along the border between Poland and Ukraine. We quantitatively compared the results of OBIA-based versus per-pixel classifications for both land cover and land use, respectively. Our results show that land-cover classification was not significantly improved when OBIA-based methods were used. Although overall classification accuracy was modest, land-use classification was significantly improved when OBIA-based methods were applied using both spectral and spatial/geometric features of image objects, but not when spectral or spatial/geometric features were used independently. Our results suggest that in anthropogenically altered landscapes where the geometry and arrangement of surface spatial structure may convey land-use information, use of OBIA-based techniques may provide a powerful tool for improving classification.