ISPRS-Annals ISPRS Annals of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences ISPRS-Annals ISPRS Ann. Photogramm. Remote Sens. Spatial Inf. Sci. 2194-9050 Copernicus Publications Göttingen, Germany 10.5194/isprsannals-I-7-99-2012 OPTIMIZING OBJECT-BASED CLASSIFICATION IN URBAN ENVIRONMENTS USING VERY HIGH RESOLUTION GEOEYE-1 IMAGERY Aguilar M. A. 1 Vicente R. 1 Aguilar F. J. 1 Fernández A. 2 Saldaña M. M. 1 High School Engineering, Department of Agricultural Engineering, Almería University, 04120 La Cañada de San Urbano, Almería, Spain Escola de Enxeñaría Industrial, Department of Engineering Design, Vigo University, Campus Universitario, 36310 Vigo, Spain 17 07 2012 I-7 99 104 Copyright: © 2012 M. A. Aguilar et al. 2012 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ This article is available from https://isprs-annals.copernicus.org/articles/I-7/99/2012/isprs-annals-I-7-99-2012.html The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://isprs-annals.copernicus.org/articles/I-7/99/2012/isprs-annals-I-7-99-2012.pdf

The latest breed of very high resolution (VHR) commercial satellites opens new possibilities for cartographic and remote sensing applications. In fact, one of the most common applications of remote sensing images is the extraction of land cover information for digital image base maps by means of classification techniques. When VHR satellite images are used, an object-based classification strategy can potentially improve classification accuracy compared to pixel based classification. The aim of this work is to carry out an accuracy assessment test on the classification accuracy in urban environments using pansharpened and panchromatic GeoEye-1 orthoimages. In this work, the influence on object-based supervised classification accuracy is evaluated with regard to the sets of image object (IO) features used for classification of the land cover classes selected. For the classification phase the nearest neighbour classifier and the eCognition v. 8 software were used, using seven sets of IO features, including texture, geometry and the principal layer values features. The IOs were attained by eCognition using a multiresolution segmentation approach that is a bottom-up regionmerging technique starting with one-pixel. Four different sets or repetitions of training samples, always representing a 10% for each classes were extracted from IOs while the remaining objects were used for accuracy validation. A statistical test was carried out in order to strengthen the conclusions. An overall accuracy of 79.4% was attained with the panchromatic, red, blue, green and near infrared (NIR) bands from the panchromatic and pansharpened orthoimages, the brightness computed for the red, blue, green and infrared bands, the Maximum Difference, a mean of soil-adjusted vegetation index (SAVI), and, finally the normalized Digital Surface Model or Object Model (nDSM), computed from LiDAR data. For buildings classification, nDSM was the most important feature attaining producer and user accuracies of around 95%. On the other hand, for the class "vegetation", SAVI was the most significant feature, obtaining accuracies close to 90%.