A Study on the Land Cover Characteristics in Korea : Application of Hybrid Classifier and Topographic Normalization

The topographical effect resulted from rugged terrains and inhomogeneous spectral characteristics due to the complexly mixed land cover condition of Korea substantially lower the remotely sensed land cover classification accuracy In this study, a topographic correction method using digital elevation model to alleviate the topographic effects. To deal with inhomogeneous spectral characteristic, a hybrid classifier with inclusion of prior probabilities was introduced. This investigation concluded that the topographical normalization and hybrid classification with prior probabilities are effective on rugged landscape. The overall and average classification accuracies were improved by 0.92％ and 1.016％ respectively. The most substantial and noticeable accuracy improvement was observed in forest areas.