Comparison between Possibilistic c-Means (PCM) and Artificial Neural Network (ANN) Classification Algorithms in Land use/ Land cover Classification

There are several statistical classification algorithms available for land use/land cover classification. However, each has a certain bias or compromise. Some methods like the parallel piped approach in supervised classification, cannot classify continuous regions within a feature. On the other hand, while unsupervised classification method takes maximum advantage of spectral variability in an image, the maximally separable clusters in spectral space may not do much for our perception of important classes in a given study area. In this research, the output of an ANN algorithm was compared with the Possibilistic c-Means an improvement of the fuzzy c-Means on both moderate resolutions Landsat8 and a high resolution Formosat 2 images. The Formosat 2 image comes with an 8m spectral resolution on the multispectral data. This multispectral image data was resampled to 10m in order to maintain a uniform ratio of 1:3 against Landsat 8 image. Six classes were chosen for analysis including: Dense forest, eucalyptus, water, grassland, wheat and riverine sand. Using a standard false color composite (FCC), the six features reflected differently in the infrared region with wheat producing the brightest pixel values. Signature collection per class was therefore easily obtained for all classifications. The output of both ANN and FCM, were analyzed separately for accuracy and an error matrix generated to assess the quality and accuracy of the classification algorithms. When you compare the results of the two methods on a per-class-basis, ANN had a crisper output compared to PCM which yielded clusters with pixels especially on the moderate resolution Landsat 8 imagery.