A HIERARCHICAL APPROACH TO HIGH-RESOLUTION HYPERSPECTRAL IMAGE CLASSIFICATION OF LITTLE MIAMI RIVER WATERSHED FOR ENVIRONMENTAL MODELING

Compact Airborne Spectrographic Imager (CASI) hyperspectral imagery was acquired over the Little Miami River Watershed (1756 square miles) in Ohio, U.S.A., which is one of the largest hyperspectral image acquisition. For the development of a 4m-resolution land cover dataset, a hierarchical approach was employed using two different classification algorithms: 'Image Object Segmentation' for level-1 and 'Spectral Angle Mapper' for level-2. This classification scheme was developed to overcome the spectral inseparability of urban and rural features and to deal with radiometric distortions due to cross-track illumination. The land cover class members were lentic, lotic, forest, corn, soybean, wheat, dry herbaceous, grass, urban barren, rural barren, urban/built, and unclassified. The final phase of processing was completed after an extensive Quality Assurance and Quality Control (QA/QC) phase. With respect to the eleven land cover class members, the overall accuracy with a total of 902 reference points was 83.9% at 4m resolution. The dataset is available for public research, and applications of this product will represent an improvement over more commonly utilized data of coarser spatial resolution such as National Land Cover Data (NLCD).