VEGETATION COVER MAPPING USING HYBRID ANALYSIS OF IKONOS DATA

Detailed mapping of vegetation cover types is often required in various environmental study projects. Very high-resolution satellites, e.g. IKONOS, are expected to provide a new opportunity to make detailed vegetation cover maps efficiently for large study areas. This paper reports the methodology of the vegetation cover mapping using IKONOS data for a watershed management project in south-western Japan. In this study, we examined spectral, geometric, and textual properties of image objects extracted through both object-based and pixel-based image classification of IKONOS panchromatic, mulit-spectral, and pan-sharpen images of the study area to check whether vegetation cover types in the study area are distinguishable using IKONOS data. The result of the analysis shows that, in conjunction with spectral information, textural and geometric information of image objects extracted from IKONOS data provide useful information for detailed vegetation cover classification. Based on the analysis, we developed a multi-scale object-based image analysis method for vegetation cover mapping using IKONOS data. Applying the multi-scale analysis to IKONOS images, a vegetation cover map of the study area was obtained