Optimizing Image Resolution to Maximize the Accuracy of Hard Classification

There are three strategies by which the accuracy of classification can be improved after the imagery that will be used for the classification has been chosen. These are to improve the definition of the class decision surfaces, to maximize the between class distances, and to reduce the within class variances. This paper reports on work done to investigate the relationship between classification accuracy and within class variances, where generally accepted measures of accuracy derived from the Confusion Matrix are used as the indicators of classification accuracy. This paper shows that the within class variances are a function of image resolution, and it provides a mechanism based on the Average Local Variance (ALV) function to find the resolution that will yield the highest relative within field classification accuracy by minimizing the within class variances.