Automatic Farmland Extraction From Multi-temporal

Landsat TM Data Based On Artificial Neural

Network
Mu Bai Huiping Liu Wenli Huang Yu Qiao Xiaodong Mu
School of Geography, Beijing Normal University,
Beijing, 100875, China
E-mail:baimu123@163.com

Abstract—It is an important method of the land use change dynamic land cove class from other remote sensing imagery. This study
monitoring to withdraw the land utilization information using remote is carried out on the basis of the work for monitoring LUCC in
sensing image accurately and quickly. However, most of them Beijing using remote sensing technology. This work has
seemed to be immature enough. This paper aims to use the prior accumulated remote sensing images and land cover maps by
knowledge which is established from one land cover map and remote
sensing imagery to realize the automatic extraction of specific land
maximum likelihood classification method for many years.
cove class from other remote sensing imagery. The TM satellite
imageries in Changyang District of Beijing are taken as an example,
and the automatic extraction procession introduce various key
II. STUDY AREA
technology including relative radiometric correction, feature selection This study was undertaken at Chaoyang District located in
and ANN. The results show that the classification accuracies between the eastern part of Beijing (figure 1). The district covers an area
the mentioned approach and conventional statistical method (MLC) of 455.2km2, with a population over 1.3 million—the highest
for individual remote sensing image are very close. of all districts in Beijing. The majority of the district is
characterized as urban fringe with the most rapid urban
Keywords-ANN; Multi-temporal; Automatic Extraction; expansion in the past two decades. From 1978, the area of
Farmland agricultural land decreased sharply: 18.8% from 1982 to 1989
and 6.5% from 1989 to 1992. Residential and industrial land,
I. INTRODUCTION on the other hand, increased about 28.2% from 1982 to 1989,
Monitoring urban areas at a regional scale, and even at a and 14.9% from 1989 to 1992 (Cao and Cai 1993).
global scale, has become an increasingly important topic in the
last decades in order to keep track of the loss of natural areas
due to urban development( Gomez-Chova, et al, 2006),
especially serious losses of arable land. The conventional
surveying and mapping techniques are expensive and time
consuming for urban LULC change. Based on multi-temporal
remote sensing imageries, change detection methods are
powerful and cost-effective tools.
There are numerous change detection methods, including
three main categories that are image algebra ( Sohl,1999; Ridd
& Liu ,1998), data Transformation (Collins & Woodcoch,
1996) and post-classification analysis(PCA)(Currit,2005)
respectively. The major advantages of PCA method is the
capability of providing information on the nature of change. Figure 1. The study area (Chaoyang District), located in the urban fringe
However, selecting high-quality and sufficiently numerous area of Beijing, China
training sample sets for image classification is often difficult,
in particular for historical image data classification. The time
III. METHODOLOGY
consuming and difficult task of producing highly accurate
classifications often leads to unsatisfactory change detection A. Data acquisition and pre-processing
results, especially when high-quality training sample data are
not available(Lu, et al.,2004). Landsat TM images were acquired on 16 May 1991, 21
Sept. 1997, with six bands except thermal band for this study.
This paper describes the method which uses the prior The remotely sensed data were rectified geometrically to a
knowledge from one classified land cover map and remote common universal transverse mercator (UTM) coordinate
sensing imagery to realize the automatic extraction of specific system, using 48 ground control points spreading throughout
the scene and the root mean square errors of less than 30m (1 is 3×3, co-occurrence shift is one by one, gray quantization
pixel) were achieved. The second-degree polynomial levels is 64. And there are eight single bands per spectral
transformation and nearest neighbour method were used. band.
During classification process of high dimensional data
B. Relative Radiometric Correction set, feature selection is available tool for finding lower
dimensional space where classification accuracy might even
The process of radiometric correction normalization is lead to increase. There are different feature selection
necessary as change detection is highly dependent on accurate techniques such as branch-and-bound, floating search,
geometric and radiometric correction. A traditional discriminant analysis and genetic algorithms(Goldberg,1989).
radiometric normalization method, image regression (IR) was Because of advantages of GA in remote sensing application,
applied in this research. the proposed method uses GA to select appropriate object
In this section, we adopted the method that Zhang et features useful for the particular classification problem(Van
al.(2006) proposed in their thesis. The first step of the Relative Coillie, et al.,2007).
Radiometric Normalization (RRN) of multi-temporal images The technique processing of GA strategy of the feature
is to select the Pseudo-Invariant Features (PIFs) . The selection can be described as: (1) Coding, the problem is
selection of PIFs by visual interpretation is subjective. In coded into a binary string where the genes can have the value
practice , two dates of images are normalized radiometrically, 0 or 1; (2) Initial population, the mating pool start with 100
which selects candidate PIFs objectively with technique individuals; (3) Fitness function, J-divengence
including difference threshold, principal component analysis, entropy(Chen,et al.,2005) is used for calculating fitness;(4)
and regression analysis procedures. Based on gains and offsets Selection, In this study uses tournament selection algorithm.
calculated, the image in 1991 is normalized radiometrically to (5) Crossover, the crossover probability is set to 0.7 with
the reference image in 1997. single-point crossover; (6) Mutation, The mutation probability
equals 0.2; (7) the stopping principle, reproduction stops after
TABLE I. CORRELATION COEFFICIENTS FOR THE PSEUDO THE PSEUDO-
VARIANT FEATURES 300 generations. From the offspring, the 28 best performing
features are selected for subsequent classification.
Band
Raw(1991-1997) RRN(1991-1997)
Index
E. Supervised Classification
Band 1 0.796 0.923
In nearly all cases, the neural network classifier has
Band 2 0.787 0.914 proved its superiority to traditional classifiers, usually with 10-
20% overall accuracy improvement (Liu et al.,2004).
Band 3 0.884 0.997
A neural network consisted of three types of layers:
Band 4 0.764 0.902 input, hidden and output layers which receive, process and
Band 5 0.683 0.957 present the final results, respectively (Figure 2). The BP-ANN
is chosen for this study as it is the most common type of ANN
Band 6 0.903 0.903 used in remote sensing. The connection weight training in BP-
ANN is normally completed by a back propagation learning
algorithm (Rumelhart et al.,1986). Our experiment
C. Building training set
environment chooses the toolbox of NN in Matlab. The
There are four main categories in classified land cover network training is carried out using the gradient descent
map of 1991: class1 corresponds to covered farmland and algorithm. The training process can be stopped according to
uncovered farmland; class 2 is habitation and building-up; the situation that a minimum error function is reached before a
class 3 is forestland and class 4 is water. The sample strategy fixed number of epochs. In the experiments, the minimum
is stratified sampling on classified land cover map. A total of error is 0.01 and the fixed number of epochs is 5000.
200 training samples are chosen.

D. Feature selection w ji wkj

Image texture is an important characteristic of remotely x0 y0
sensed images: it represents spatial variation in digital image
spectral brightness or digital number (Berberoglu, et al.,2007).
The texture analysis method based on gray level co- xn −1 ym −1
occurrence matrix, can describe the spatial distribution and
structure of the pixels from remote sensing image and be of
advantage to improve the target classification of the image
(Jiang & Liu,2004).
In the paper, the texture analyzing model of ENVI4.3 is
used, the parameters of GLCM are processing windows size Figure 2. ANN Structure(Luo et al.,2001)
 The input parameters consist of spectral information and
selected texture information. The number of hidden nodes is
determined by trial and error(Bischof & Leonardis,1998). The
output neurons represent land cover categories. The output
value is a number between 1 and 0 as background and
farmland pixel, respectively. The network topology was
established as 34 nodes for the input layer and 2 nodes for the
output layer. The output generated by the ANN was coded as
‘winner takes all’, where the most heavily activated output
nodes were valued at +1, while all other outputs were valued
at 0. This ‘hard’ classification, therefore, produced only the
code of the predicted class for each pixel.
IV. RESULT AND CONCLUSIONS
The 100 test sites for the farmland/non-farmland types of
study area are chosen randomly from the image of remote
sensing to assess the classification accuracy. Sample
characterization into the two land categories is implemented
using the same procedure (visual-interpretation of the SPOT-5
panchromatic image) used in the evaluation of the binary
images.
For comparison purposes, a maximum likelihood
classifier was applied to the Landsat Thematic Mapper(TM)
image (6 bands) captured on a date (21/9/1997), whose
classification result was the production for monitoring Beijing
LCLU project in 1997. There were four more categories which
were the impervious area, farmland, forest land and water. For
evaluation purposes, the classification results were masked.
Only the two classes were presented on the new classification
image.
(a) (b)
Figure 3. The classification result
The proposed approach produced on thematic farmland
map(fig.3(a)). The maximum likelihood classified image for
1997 is given in fig.3(b). Table 2 is prepared to analyze the
accuracy of the mapping results. In this study, the automatic
classification approach appears to be superior to the MLC
approach. The Kappa coefficient of MLC and Automatic
classification approach are 0.6951 and 0.699, respectively.
The reasons for better accuracy with MLC than Automatic
classification approach are possibly because of the problem of
training sample sets and difference imaging conditions.
TABLE II. CLASSIFICATION ACCURACY IN THIS STUDY
Information Extraction Overall accuracy Kappa
MLC(1991) 0.8 0.6
MLC(1997) 0.85 0.6951
Automatic classification
0.85 0.699
method
In this study, we attempted to extract automatically
farmland information from remote sensing image based on the
prior knowledge with the previous classification result. The
classification accuracy of the automatic classification method
is close that of MLC and the classification efficiency of the
automatic classification method is prominent. The accuracy of
classification result base on automatic classification method
may be affected by training samples selection and difference
image conditions. But the mentioned method may serve a way
to improve the automation degree of classification process.
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