Spectral and Textural Features to Classify Elusive Land Cover at the Urban Fringe

Land-cover classification using only remotely sensed spectral features does not provide accurate information on all urban-fringe classes. Four texture measures used in conjunction with LANDSAT spectral features were empirically evaluated to determine their utility in Level II and III land-cover mapping. The contrast and high-frequency measures improved land-cover classification at the urban fringe. However, the decision to use texture measures should be weighed carefully because they yield only a small, yet important, increment in absolute classification accuracy and entail additional expense for data preprocessing.