Performance of Support Vector Machine for Classifying Land Cover in Optical Satellite Images: A Case Study in Delaware River Port Area

The availability of high-resolution satellite images provides precise information without direct observation of the research target. Korea Multi-Purpose Satellite (KOMPSAT), also known as the Arirang satellite, has been developed and utilized for earth observation. The machine learning model was continuously proven as a good classifier in classifying remotely sensed images. This study aimed to compare the performance of the support vector machine (SVM) model in classifying the land cover of the Delaware River port area on high and medium-resolution images. Three optical images, which are KOMPSAT-2, KOMPSAT-3A, and Sentinel-2B, were classified into six land cover classes, including water, road, vegetation, building, vacant, and shadow. The KOMPSAT images are provided by Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI), and the Sentinel-2B image was provided by the European Space Agency (ESA). The training samples were manually digitized for each land cover class and considered the reference image. The predicted images were compared to the actual data to obtain the accuracy assessment using a confusion matrix analysis. In addition, the time-consuming training and classifying were recorded to evaluate the model performance. The results showed that the KOMPSAT-3A image has the highest overall accuracy and followed by KOMPSAT-2 and Sentinel-2B results. On the contrary, the model took a long time to classify the higher-resolution image compared to the lower resolution. For that reason, we can conclude that the SVM model performed better in the higher resolution image with the consequence of the longer time-consuming training and classifying data. Thus, this finding might provide consideration for related researchers when selecting satellite imagery for effective and accurate image classification.