A Hybrid Approach for Land Use/Land Cover Classification

Atlanta has continuously changed its physical landscape as well as its socioeconomic appearance over the past decades. A hybrid image processing approach, which integrated unsupervised, supervised, and spectral mixture analysis (SMA) classification methods, was used to identify urban land use/land cover changes over a decade (from 1990 to 2000) in the Atlanta metropolitan area. During this process, SMA was proven to be an effective analytical approach for characterizing mixed feature areas, such as a metropolitan area. According to accuracy assessment, the classification results were acceptable.