A hybrid classification scheme for mining multisource geospatial data

Supervised learning methods such as Maximum Likelihood (ML) are often used in land cover (thematic) classification of remote sensing imagery. ML classifier relies exclusively on spectral characteristics of thematic classes whose statistical distributions are often overlapping. The spectral response distributions of thematic classes are dependent on many factors including elevation, soil types, and atmospheric conditions present at the time of data acquisition. A second problem with statistical classifiers is the requirement of large number of accurate training samples, which are often costly and time consuming to acquire over large geographic regions. With the increasing availability of geospatial databases, it is possible to exploit the knowledge derived from these ancillary datasets to improve classification accuracies even when the class distributions are highly overlapping. Likewise newer semi-supervised techniques can be adopted to improve the parameter estimates of statistical model by utilizing a large number of easily available unlabeled training samples. Unfortunately there is no convenient multivariate statistical model that can be employed for mulitsource geospatial databases. In this paper we present a hybrid semi-supervised learning algorithm that effectively exploits freely available unlabeled training samples from multispectral remote sensing images and also incorporates ancillary geospatial databases. We have conducted several experiments on real datasets, and our new hybrid approach shows over 15% improvement in classifciation accuracy over conventional classification schemes.