Evaluating EO1-Hyperion capability for mapping conifer and broadleaved forests

Abstract

The objective of the present study is the comparison of the combined use of Earth Observation-1 (EO-1) Hyperion Hyperspectral images with the Random Forest (RF), Support Vector Machines (SVM) and Multivariate Adaptive Regression Splines (MARS) classifiers for discriminating forest cover groups, namely broadleaved and coniferous forests. Statistics derived from classification confusion matrix were used to assess the accuracy of the derived thematic maps. We demonstrated that Hyperion data can be effectively used to obtain rapid and accurate large-scale mapping of main forest types (conifers-broadleaved). We also verified higher capability of Hyperion imagery with respect to Landsat data to such an end. Results demonstrate the ability of the three tested classification methods, with small improvements given by SVM in terms of overall accuracy and kappa statistic.