A study of a Gaussian mixture model for urban land-cover mapping based on VHR remote sensing imagery

This article proposes a Gaussian-mixture-model (GMM)-based method with optimal Gaussian components to address the high intra-class spectral variability in urban land-cover mapping using remote sensing images with very high resolution (VHR). GMMs can simulate and approximate any data distribution provided the optimal Gaussian components can be found. Through improving the model parameters in view of the characteristic of VHR remote sensing images, the parameter space of GMM is optimized significantly, and the model can find the optimal Gaussian components that are suitable for remote sensing images with different resolutions. Experimental results of Wuhan urban area using two images with different resolutions have demonstrated the efficiency and effectiveness of the model. The optimized GMM-based method performs at least comparably or superior to the state-of-the-art classifiers such as support vector machines (SVMs), characterizes man-made land-cover types better than conventional methods, fuses spectral and textural features of VHR image properly, and meanwhile has lower computational complexity.