Title: Genetic algorithm-based feature selection for classification of land cover changes using combined LANDSAT and ENVISAT images

Authors: N. Suresh Kumar; M. Arun

Addresses: AP (SG), School of Computing Science and Engineering, VIT University, Vellore, India ' School of Electronics Engineering, VIT University, Vellore, India

Abstract: Recent monsoon failures and reduced rain falls urge the environmental and ecology researchers to concentrate on the land cover changes. Significant and efficient way to monitor the land cover changes is satellite image classification. This work describes the combination of remotely sensed data, LANDSAT and ENVISAT images, to improve the classification accuracy. Instead of predictor space, embedding space is considered in the proposed KNNES and SVMES methods and applied for the classification of combined LANDSAT and ENVISAT datasets. Genetic algorithm-based (GA) feature selection is adopted to enhance the proposed classification methods. Classification of land cover changes of the study area are identified as used land, unused land, forest and vegetation. Proposed methods are evaluated by an accuracy analysis which follows good practice recommendations. Accuracy is quantified by reporting standard errors, i.e., producer accuracy, user accuracy, omission error and commission error. Performance of the proposed SVM and KNN-based methods using GA-based feature selection for combined dataset is improved significantly and provide overall accuracy 80% and 76% respectively.

Keywords: K-nearest neighbourhood; KNN; support vector machine; SVM; genetic algorithm; classification; land coverage.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBIC.2017.086700

International Journal of Bio-Inspired Computation, 2017 Vol.10 No.3, pp.172 - 187

Received: 17 Mar 2015
Accepted: 19 Feb 2016

Published online: 21 Sep 2017 *

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