Land-cover classification using multi-temporal GF-1 wide field view data

Vegetation is an important land-cover type and its growth characteristics have potential for improving land-cover classification accuracy using remote-sensing data. However, due to lack of suitable remote-sensing data, temporal features are difficult to acquire for high spatial resolution land-cover classification. Several studies have extracted temporal features by fusing time-series Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer data and Landsat data. Nevertheless, this method needs assumption of no land-cover change occurring during the period of blended data and the fusion results also present certain errors influencing temporal features extraction. Therefore, time-series high spatial resolution data from a single sensor are ideal for land-cover classification using temporal features. The Chinese GF-1 satellite wide field view (WFV) sensor has realized the ability of acquiring multispectral data with decametric spatial resolution, high temporal resolution and wide coverage, which contain abundant temporal information for improving land-cover classification accuracy. Therefore, it is of important significance to investigate the performance of GF-1 WFV data on land-cover classification. Time-series GF-1 WFV data covering the vegetation growth period were collected and temporal features reflecting the dynamic change characteristics of ground-objects were extracted. Then, Support Vector Machine classifier was used to land-cover classification based on the spectral features and their combination with temporal features. The validation results indicated that temporal features could effectively reflect the growth characteristics of different vegetation and finally improved classification accuracy of approximately 7%, reaching 92.89% with vegetation type identification accuracy greatly improved. The study confirmed that GF-1 WFV data had good performances on land-cover classification, which could provide reliable high spatial resolution land-cover data for related applications.