Classification of Complex Urban Fringe Land Cover Using Evidential Reasoning Based on Fuzzy Rough Set: A Case Study of Wuhan City

Urban fringe is the transition zone fine grained with urban and non-urban land cover types. The complex landscape mosaic in this area challenges the land cover classification based on the remote-sensing data. Spectral signatures are not efficient to discriminate all pixels into classes. To improve the recognition and handle the uncertainty, this paper provides a novel integrated approach, based on a fuzzy rough set and evidential reasoning (FRSER), for land cover classification in an urban fringe area. The approach is implemented on Landsat Operation Land Imager data covering the urban fringe area of Wuhan city, China. A fuzzy rough set is first used to define a decision table from multispectral imagery and ground reference data. Then the fuzzy rough information system is interpreted using the Dempster–Shafer theory, based on an evidential reasoning system. A final land cover classification with uncertainty is achieved by evidential reasoning. The results are compared with the traditional maximum likelihood classifier (MLC) and some rough set-based classifiers including classical rough set classifier (RS), fuzzy rough set classifier (FRS), and variable precision fuzzy rough set classifier (VPFRS). The better overall accuracy, user’s and producer’s accuracies, and the kappa coefficient, in comparison with the other classifiers, suggest that the proposed approach can effectively discriminate land cover types in urban fringe areas with high inter-class similarities and intra-class heterogeneity. It is also capable of handling the uncertainty in data processing, and the final land cover map comes with a degree of uncertainty. The proposed approach that can efficiently integrate the merits of both the fuzzy rough set and DS theory provides an efficient method for urban fringe land cover classification.