Impact of discretization methods on the rough set-based classification of remotely sensed images

This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution , reselling , loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. In recent years, the rough set (RS) method has been in common use for remote-sensing classification, which provides one of the techniques of information extraction for Digital Earth. The discretization of remotely sensed data is an important data preprocessing approach in classical RS-based remote-sensing classification. Appropriate discretization methods can improve the adaptability of the classification rules and increase the accuracy of the remote-sensing classification. To assess the performance of discretization methods this article adopts three indicators, which are the compression capability indicator (CCI), consistency indicator (CI), and number of the cut points (NCP). An appropriate discretization method for the RS-based classification of a given remotely sensed image can be found by comparing the values of the three indicators and the classification accuracies of the discretized remotely sensed images obtained with the different discretization methods. To investigate the effectiveness of our method, this article applies three discretization methods of the Entropy/MDL, Naive, and SemiNaive to a TM image and three indicators for these discretization methods are then calculated. After comparing the three indicators and the classification accuracies of the discretized remotely sensed images, it has been found that the SemiNaive method significantly reduces large quantities of data and also keeps satisfactory classification accuracy. 1. Introduction Digital Earth originally proposed by Gore (1998) is an information expression of the real Earth and is a new way of understanding the Earth in the twenty-first century (Guo et al. 2009). It is mainly composed of the following five phases: data extraction, information extraction, knowledge extraction, modeling, and decision making (Chen and van Genderen 2008). Remote-sensing technology provides a strong technical support for the phase of data extraction, while information extraction techniques, such as image classification, geo-statistical analysis, and data …