Image Classification
Classification of land-use and land-cover type is a common data analysis technique in environmental sustainability applications. Often in studies of environmental sustainability issues, we are interested in the natural and human features present on the landscape, and how the landscape has (or may have) changed and evolved over a period of time. In these applications, particular land-use or land-cover classes are identified based on the spectral characteristics of each respective pixel in an image.
There are two main types of image classification: supervised and unsupervised. The decision to use a supervised or unsupervised classification approach may be influenced by several factors, including the spatial and spectral resolution of the image and the complexity of the area under investigation.