ABSTRACT:
Land Use/Land Cover (LULC) classifications have proven to be valuable assets for resource managers interested in landscape
characteristics and the changes that occur over time. This study made a comparison of an object-based classification with supervised
and unsupervised pixel-based classification. Two multi-temporal (leaf-on and leaf-off), medium-spatial resolution SPOT-5 satellite
images and a high-spatial resolution color infrared digital orthophoto were used in the analysis. Combinations of these three images
were merged to evaluate the relative importance of multi-temporal and multi-spatial imagery to classification accuracy. The object-
based classification using all three-image datasets produced the highest overall accuracy (82.0%), while the object-based
classification using the high-spatial resolution image merged with the SPOT-5 leaf-off image had the second highest overall
accuracy (78.2%). While not significantly different from each other, these two object-based classifications were statistically
significantly different from the other classifications. The presence of the high-spatial resolution imagery had a greater impact on
improving overall accuracy than the multi-temporal dataset, especially with the object-based classifications.