The Comparison of Visual Interpretation & Digital Classification of SPOT Satellite Image

The land use type of Korea is high-density. So, the image classification using coarse resolution satellite image may not provide land cover classification results as good as expected. The purpose of this paper is to compare the result of visual interpretation with that of digital image classification of 20 m resolution SPOT satellite image at Kwangju-eup, Kyunggi-do, Korea. Classes are forest, cultivated field, pasture, water and residential area, which are clearly discriminated in visual interpretation. Maximum likelihood classifier was used for digital image classification. Accuracy assessment was done by comparing each classification result with ground truth data obtained from field checking. The classification result from the visual interpretation presented an total accuracy 9.23 percent higher than that of the digital image classification. This proves the importance of visual interpretation for the area with high density land use like the study site in Korea.