7.Textural Characterization from various representations of MERIS data Texture characteristics of MERIS data based on the Gray-Level Co-occurrence Matrices (GLCM) are explored as far as their classification capabilities are concerned. Classification is employed in order to reveal four different land cover types, namely: water, forest, field and urban areas. The classification performance for each cover type is studied separately on each spectral band, while the combined performance of the most promising spectral bands is explored. In addition to GLCM, spectral co-occurrence matrices (SCM) formed by measuring the transition from band-to-band are employed for improving classification results. Conventional classifiers and voting techniques are used for the classification stage. Furthermore, the properties of texture characteristics are explored on various types of grayscale or RGB representations of the multispectral data, obtained by means of principal components analysis (PCA), non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) and information theory. Finally, the accuracy of the proposed classification approach is compared with that of the minimum distance classifier.

The proposed textural characterization approach for MERIS data and various representations of them.