Large-Scale Classification of Land Cover Using Retrospective Satellite Data

Large-scale mapping of land cover is considered in the paper as a problem of automated processing of big geospatial data, which may contain various uncertainties. To solve it, we propose to use three different paradigms, namely, decomposition method, the method of active learning from the scope of intelligent computations, and method of satellite images reconstruction. Such an approach allows us to minimize the participation of experts in solving the problem. Within solving the problem of land cover classification we also investigated three different approaches of data fusion. The most efficient data fusion method is one that could be reduced to the problem of classification on the base of time-series images. Developed automated methodology was applied to land cover mapping and classification for the whole territory of Ukraine for 1990, 2000, and 2010 with a 30-meter spatial resolution.