Improvement of classification in urban areas by the use of textural features: the case study of Lucknow city, Uttar Pradesh

Investigations have been carried out for digital spectral and textural classification of an Indian urban environment using SPOT images with grey level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM), grey level difference histogram (GLDH), and sum and difference histogram (SADH) approaches. The results indicate that a combination of texture and spectral features significantly improves the classification accuracy compared with classification with pure spectral features only. This improvement is about 9% and 17% for an addition of one and two texture features, respectively. GLDH and SADH give statistically similar results to GLCM, and take less computing time than GLCM. Conventional separability measures like transformed divergence, Bhattacharya distance, etc. are not effective in feature selection when classification is carried out with spectral and texture features. An alternative approach using simple statistics such as average coefficient of variation, skewness, and kurtosis and correlation amongst feature sets has shown greater feature selection potential when a combination of spectral and texture features is used.