A Comparative Study of Supervised Learning Techniques for Remote Sensing Image Classification

Remote sensing image classification has long attracted the attention of the remote‐sensing community because classification results are the basis for many environmental and socioeconomic applications. The classification involves a number of steps, one of the most important is the selection of an effective image classification technique. This paper provides a comparative study of the supervised learning techniques for remote sensing image classification. The study is being focused on classification of land cover and land use. Supervised learning is a branch of machine learning and is used in this study. The comparison is made among the different techniques of pixel-based supervised classification used for remote sensing image classification. The study has been made on a labelled data set. After the implementation, support vector machine has been found to be the most effective algorithm among the five algorithms of pixel-based supervised classification (i.e. maximum likelihood estimation, minimum distance classifier, principal component analysis, isoclustering and support vector machine).