Impact of discretization methods on the rough set-based classification of remotely sensed images

In recent years, the rough set (RS) method has been in common use for remote-sensing classification, which provides one of the techniques of information extraction for Digital Earth. The discretization of remotely sensed data is an important data preprocessing approach in classical RS-based remote-sensing classification. Appropriate discretization methods can improve the adaptability of the classification rules and increase the accuracy of the remote-sensing classification. To assess the performance of discretization methods this article adopts three indicators, which are the compression capability indicator (CCI), consistency indicator (CI), and number of the cut points (NCP). An appropriate discretization method for the RS-based classification of a given remotely sensed image can be found by comparing the values of the three indicators and the classification accuracies of the discretized remotely sensed images obtained with the different discretization methods. To investigate the effectiveness of our method, this article applies three discretization methods of the Entropy/MDL, Naive, and SemiNaive to a TM image and three indicators for these discretization methods are then calculated. After comparing the three indicators and the classification accuracies of the discretized remotely sensed images, it has been found that the SemiNaive method significantly reduces large quantities of data and also keeps satisfactory classification accuracy.