A competitive pixel-object approach for land cover classification

This paper describes a novel remote sensing land cover classification approach named competitive pixel-object classification, based on Bayesian neural networks and image segmentation. This approach makes use of both pixel spectral features and object features resulting from image segmentation through a competitive mechanism to resolve the problem of spectral confusion caused by reflectance similarity of some land cover types that traditional pixel-based classification cannot resolve. The competitive pixel-object method reduces the unreliability of object feature information produced by over- or under-segmentation of the image through a competitive mechanism. The experiment shows that the competitive pixel-object approach produces higher classification accuracy than either pixel-based classification or object-oriented classification.