A novel unsupervised bee colony optimization (UBCO) method for remote sensing image classification:a case study in a heterogeneous marsh area

Unsupervised image classification is an important means to obtain land use/cover information in the field of remote sensing, since it does not require initial knowledge (training samples) for classification. Traditional methods such as k-means and ISODATA have limitations in solving this NP-hard unsupervised classification problem, mainly due to their strict assumptions about the data distribution. The bee colony optimization (BCO) is a new type of swarm intelligence, based upon which a simple and novel unsupervised bee colony optimization (UBCO) method is proposed for remote sensing image classification. UBCO possesses powerful exploitation and exploration capacities that are carried out by employed bees, onlookers and scouts. This enables the promising regions to be globally searched quickly and thoroughly, without becoming trapped on local optima. In addition, it has no restrictions on data distribution, and thus is especially suitable for handling complex remote sensing data. We tested the method on the Zhalong National Nature Reserve (ZNNR)—a typical inland wetland ecosystem in China, whose landscape is heterogeneous. The preliminary results showed that UBCO (overall accuracy = 80.81%) achieved statistically significant better classification result (McNemar test) in comparison with traditional k-means (63.11%) and other intelligent clustering methods built on genetic algorithm (UGA, 71.49%), differential evolution (UDE, 77.57%) and particle swarm optimization (UPSO, 69.86%). The robustness and superiority of UBCO were also demonstrated from the two other study sites next to the ZNNR with distinct landscapes (urban and natural landscapes). Enabling to consistently find the optimal or nearly optimal global solution in image clustering, the UBCO is thus suggested as a robust method for unsupervised remote sensing image classification, especially in the case of heterogeneous areas