REMOTE SENSING OF BEIJING

Subject: Urban Remote Sensing

Assignment Name: Supervised and Unsupervised Classification of Beijing Water Bodies.
Name: Jahangirsoomro
Student Number: 201429180009
Dated: 2015/06/21
INTRODUCTION
For the completion of the course, we have to make an assignment regarding the supervised and
unsupervised classification of Beijing. Making the supervised and unsupervised classification of the area I
have used the Envi 4.7 Software for this.
Envi 4.7 software have 9 different sub-types of supervised classification and 2 sub types of unsupervised
classification. As I have used Maximum Likelihood from the supervised classification and used K-means
and ISO-DATA from the unsupervised classification. Which are shown in Figure (1, 2, and 3)
respectively.

Figure 1: ISO-DATA

Figure 2: K-Means

Figure 3: Maximum Likelihood

From these figures we can clearly distinguish the water body area on the site. In these image process I
have used the band range 1 and red band representation of Beijing. We could see that the maximum
likelihood or supervised classification gives us a visible picture of the water bodies on the site. As
compared to the ISO-DATA and K-MEANS. The band width of these three figures are shown as below in
table 1.
Table 1.
KMeans
Basic Stats Min
Band 1

Histogram
Band 1
49.8470

Max

Mean

Stdev

5 2.580334 1.741933

DN
Npts
Total Percent Acc Pct
1 16711195 16711195 49.8470

2 1819251 18530446 5.4266 55.2736

3 2719012 21249458 8.1104 63.3840
4 3378610 24628068 10.0779 73.4619
5 8896878 33524946 26.5381 100.0000
Max
likeliho
od
Basic Stats
Min
Max
Mean
Stdev
Band 1 -6536.020020 23.822874 17.861053
9.877063
Histogram
DN
Npts
Total Percent Acc
Pct
Band 1
-6536.020020
1
1 0.0000
0.0000
Bin=25.7248 -6510.295145
0
1 0.0000
0.0000
-6484.570271
0
1 0.0000 0.0000
-6458.845397
0
1 0.0000 0.0000
-6433.120523
0
1 0.0000 0.0000
-6407.395649
0
1 0.0000 0.0000
ISO
Data
Basic Stats Min Max
Mean
Stdev
Band 1
Histogram
Band 1
52.3908

2
7 3.839092 2.152511
DN
Npts
Total Percent Acc Pct
2 17563985 17563985 52.3908
3
4
5
6
7

FINDING

1410095
1923266
2290348
2158467
8178785

18974080 4.2061
20897346 5.7368
23187694 6.8318
25346161 6.4384
33524946 24.3961

56.5969
62.3337
69.1655
75.6039
100.0000

At this point, the image is difficult to interpret. Also the decisions need to be made concerning which land
cover types each category falls within. To make these decisions, other materials and knowledge of the
area are useful. Ground truthing what is seen in the digital image with what was actually present at the
time the image was recorded makes this task more efficient and more accurate. If this knowledge is not
available, scientific reasoning may be used to group the various categories together into land use
categories.

CONCLUSION
Form the supervised and unsupervised classification of Beijing we can say that the area surrounding the
city is mostly mountains. Water body are limited and scattered on the north side of the city. Would any
ground trooping or basic land knowledge, its very hard to distinguish between the developed land and
water body The similarity of developed land and water body is because they both comes on the same
pattern of band.

MERITS AND DEMERITS OF SUPERVISED

UNSUPERVISED CLASSIFICATION

CLASSIFICATION AND

Supervised Classification
De-Merits
Classifies every pixel in the image. Recognizes that some classes have lots of spectral variability

and are likely to include pixels that are far from the class centroid
Merits

But, image data are not always normally distributed. Often, but not always, a better choice than

minimum distance classifiers

Unsupervised Classification
De-Merits
Spectral classes do not represent features on the ground. Does not consider spatial relationships
in the data. Can be very time consuming to interpret spectral classes. Spectral properties vary
over time, across images.
Merits
No prior knowledge of the image area is required. Human error is minimized. Unique spectral
classes are produced. Relatively fast and easy to performed.