Statistical learning and optimization methods for improving the efficiency in landscape image clustering and classification problems


Thesis Type: Postgraduate

Institution Of The Thesis: Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi, Institute of Applied Mathematics, Turkey

Approval Date: 2005

Student: SELİME GÜROL

Supervisor: BÜLENT KARASÖZEN

Abstract:

Remote sensing techniques are vital for early detection of several problems such as natural disasters, ecological problems and collecting information necessary for finding optimum solutions to those problems. Remotely sensed information has also important uses in predicting the future risks, urban planning, communication.Recent developments in remote sensing instrumentation offered a challenge to the mathematical and statistical methods to process the acquired information. Classification of satellite images in the context of land cover classification is the main concern of this study. Land cover classification can be performed by statistical learning methods like additive models, decision trees, neural networks, k-means methods which are already popular in unsupervised classification and clustering of image scene inverse problems. Due to the degradation and corruption of satellite images, the classification performance is limited both by the accuracy of clustering and by the extent of the classification. In this study, we are concerned with understanding the performance of the available unsupervised methods with k-means, supervised methods with Gaussian maximum likelihood which are very popular methods in land cover classification. A broader approach to the classification problem based on finding the optimal discriminants from a larger range of functions is considered also in this work. A novel method based on threshold decomposition and Boolean discriminant functions is developed as an implementable application of this approach. All methods are applied to BILSAT and Landsat satellite images using MATLAB software.