Mapping and Area Estimation of Mango Orchards of Lucknow Region by Applying Knowledge Based Decision Tree to Landsat 8 OLI Satellite Images

Abstract

Mango is a very important fruit which is liked by majority of the population due to its nutritional value and excellent taste. India is the largest producer of mango in the world. Accurate information is required for policy decision making in terms of providing subsidy, area expansion, and crop insurance planning. Hence, this type of information may be retrieve through satellite images by using the image classification techniques, which are playing a crucial role in crop cover classification, yield prediction and crop monitoring etc. Classification of optical satellite images is still a challenging task due to effect of changing atmospheric conditions such as cloud, snow, haze, dust, fog, and rain etc. In this paper, knowledge based decision tree classification (DTC) has been proposed to classify the mango orchards of Lucknow district using multi-temporal Landsat 8 operational land imager (OLI) images from year 2015 to 2017 and further mango orchard area were also estimated. In order to develop the DTC, separability analysis for various land cover classes was carried out on different vegetation indices namely, normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), modified normalized difference water index (MNDWI), and soil adjusted vegetation index (SAVI). In order to analyze the performance of DTC, most commonly used satellite image classifiers such as unsupervised classifier (i.e. ISODATA) and supervised classifier (i.e. Maximum Likelihood) have been used and it is observed that the proposed DTC outperformed these traditional classifiers. Also, accuracy assessment has been carried out to measure the performance of proposed DTC and it is observed that all of the three images from 2015 to 2017 are classified with high overall accuracy, which is ranging from 70.66% to 86.69%. Kappa Coefficient (KC) for all the three images ranged from 0.65 to 0.83, which indicates that classified images are highly acceptable for area estimation.