Classification of Land Cover on Korean Peninsula Using Multi-temporal NOAA AVHRR Imagery

Multi-temporal approaches using sequential data acquired over multiple years are essential for satisfactory discrimination between many land-cover classes whose signatures exhibit seasonal trends. At any particular time, the response of several classes may be indistinguishable. A harmonic model that can represent seasonal variability is characterized by four components: mean level, frequency, phase and amplitude. The trigonometric components of the harmonic function inherently contain temporal information about changes in land-cover characteristics. Using the estimates which are obtained from sequential images through spectral analysis, seasonal periodicity can be incorporates into multi-temporal classification. The Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) was computed for one week composites of the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) imagery over the Korean peninsula for 1996 ～ 2000 using a dynamic technique. Land-cover types were then classified both with the estimated harmonic components using an unsupervised classification approach based on a hierarchical clustering algorithm. The results of the classification using the harmonic components show that the new approach is potentially very effective for identifying land-cover types by the analysis of its multi-temporal behavior.