Land cover classification in Romanian Carpathians and Subcarpathians using multi-date Sentinel-2 remote sensing imagery

ABSTRACTIn this article, we processed Sentinel-2 images in order to obtain high accuracy land cover maps for two complementary study areas. The first is represented by the Romanian Subcarpathians, a hilly highly fragmented area with heterogeneous land cover pattern and the second by Romanian Carpathians, a mountain area with homogenous structure of vegetation cover. The aim of this article is to evaluate the potential of a singledate in comparison with multi-date images for which a complete calibration and an iterative process of supervised classification using Maximum Likelihood (ML) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithms were applied for the both study areas. The results show that in the case of Subcarpathian area, the SVM classification on multi-date images has better accuracy due to high complexity of the land cover pattern and spectral similarities between classes, while in the Carpathians, the ML returns good accuracy, consequence of high spectral separabilities between compact features. The va...