A comparison of paired histogram, maximum likelihood, class elimination, and neural network approaches for daylight global cloud classification using AVHRR imagery

The accuracy and efficiency of four approaches to identifying clouds and aerosols in remote sensing imagery are compared. These approaches are as follows: a maximum likelihood classifier, a paired histogram technique, a hybrid class elimination approach, and a back-propagation neural network. Regional comparisons were conducted on advanced very high resolution radiometer (AVHRR) local area coverage (LAC) scenes from the polar regions, desert areas, and regions of biomass-burning, areas which are known to be particularly difficult. For the polar, desert, and biomass burning regions, the maximum likelihood classifier achieved 94–97% accuracy, the neural network achieved 95–96% accuracy, and the paired histogram approach achieved 93–94% accuracy. The primary advantage to the class elimination scheme lies in its speed; its accuracy of 94–96% is comparable to that of the maximum likelihood classifier. Experiments also clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of decomposing a single global classifier into separate regional classifiers, since the regional classifiers can be more finely tuned to recognize local conditions. In addition, the effectiveness of using composite features is compared to the simpler approach of using the five AVHRR channels and the reflectance of channel 3 treated as a sixth channel as the elements of the feature vector. The results varied, demonstrating that the features cannot be chosen independently of the classifier to be used. It is also shown that superior results can obtained by training the classifiers using subclass information and collapsing the subclasses after classification. Finally, ancillary data were incorporated into the classifiers, consisting of a land/water mask, a terrain map, and a computed sunglint probability. While the neural network did not benefit from this information, the accuracy of the maximum likelihood classifier improved by 1%, and the accuracy of the paired histogram method increased by up to 4%.