A detailed comparison of neurofuzzy estimation of sub-pixel land-cover composition from remotely sensed data

Mixed pixels, which do not follow a known statistical distribution that could be parameterized, are a major source of inconvenience in classification of remote sensing images. This paper reports on an experimental study designed for the in-depth investigation of how and why two neuro-fuzzy classification schemes, whose properties are complementary, estimate sub-pixel land cover composition from remotely sensed data. The first classifier is based on the fuzzy multilayer perceptron proposed by Pal and Mitra: the second classifier consists of a two-stage hybrid (TSH) learning scheme whose unsupervised first stage is based on the fully self- organizing simplified adaptive resonance theory clustering network proposed by Baraldi. Results of the two neuro-fuzzy classifiers are assessed by means of specific evaluation tools designed to extend conventional descriptive and analytical statistical estimators to the case of multi-membership in classes. When a synthetic data set consisting of pure and mixed pixels is processed by the two neuro-fuzzy classifiers, experimental result show that: i) the two neuro- fuzzy classifiers perform better than the traditional MLP; ii) classification accuracies of the two neuro-fuzzy classifiers are comparable; and iii) the TSH classifier requires to train less background knowledge than FMLP. © (1998) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.