Segment-Based Land Cover Classification Using Texture Information In Degraded Forest Land Of North Korea

In North Korea, forests were intensively degraded by forest land reclamation for food production and firewood collection since the mid-1970s. These degraded forests have to be certainly recovered for economic support, environmental protection and disaster prevention. In order to provide detailed land cover information of forest recovery project (A/R CDM), this study was focused to develop an improved classification method for degraded forest using 2.5m SPOT-5 pan-sharpened image.The degraded forest of North Korea shows various different types of texture. This study used GLCM texture bands of segmented image with spectral bands during forest cover classification. When scale factor 40/shape factor 0.3 was used as a parameter set to generate segment image, segment image was generated on suitable segment scale that could classify types of degraded forest. Forest land cover types were classified with an optimum band combination of Bandl, Band2, band3, GLCM dissimilarity (band2), GLCM homogeneity (band2) and GLCM standard deviation (band3). Segment-based classification method using spectral bands and texture bands reached an 80.4% overall accuracy, but the method using only spectral bands yielded an 70.3% overall accuracy. As using spectral and texture bands, a classification accuracy of stocked forest and unstocked forest showed an increase of 23 similar to 25%.In this research, SPOT-5 pan-sharpened high-resolution satellite image could provide a very useful information for classifying the forest cover of North Korea in which field data collection was not available for ground truth data and verification directly. And segment-based classification method using texture information improved classification accuracy of degraded forest.