Land cover classification of Finnish Lapland using decision tree classification algorithm

Land cover of Finnish Lapland was classified to 16 land cover classes using optical IRS LISS, Spot XS and MODIS satellite images, ancillary GIS data and decision tree classifier. The aim of this study was to test decision tree classifier for land cover classification and study the effects of its parameters to classification result. In the best case, the overall accuracy was about 68% for all 16 classes when individual images were classified. The overall accuracy was only about 45% when whole mosaic was classified. It seems that the most problematic classes are those with vegetation but which are not forest.