This paper presents a novel training data extraction approach using semi-supervised learning (SSL)-based classification without the analyst intervention for time-series land-cover mapping. The SSL-based approach first performs initial classification u...
This paper presents a novel training data extraction approach using semi-supervised learning (SSL)-based classification without the analyst intervention for time-series land-cover mapping. The SSL-based approach first performs initial classification using initial training data obtained from past images including land-cover characteristics similar to the image to be classified. Reliable training data from the initial classification result are then extracted from SSL-based iterative classification using classification uncertainty information and class labels of neighboring pixels as constraints. The potential of the SSL-based training data extraction approach was evaluated from a classification experiment using unmanned aerial vehicle images in croplands. The use of new training data automatically extracted by the proposed SSL approach could significantly alleviate the misclassification in the initial classification result. In particular, isolated pixels were substantially reduced by considering spatial contextual information from adjacent pixels. Consequently, the classification accuracy of the proposed approach was similar to that of classification using manually extracted training data. These results indicate that the SSL-based iterative classification presented in this study could be effectively applied to automatically extract reliable training data for time-series land-cover mapping.