Wawrzaszek A., Aleksandrowicz S., Krupiński M., Drzewiecki W. Influence of Image Filtering on Land Cover Classification when using Fractal and Multifractal Features. PFG Photogrammetrie, Fernerkundung, Geoinformation Jahrgang 2014 Heft 2 (2014), p.101-115

Over the last years, many features describing satellite images have been proposed. In this paper we analyse and compare fractal and multifractal features in the context of the discrimination of the four most common land cover classes on very high resolution optical satellite images. In particular, we consider agricultural, forest, urban and water classes from WorldView-2 scenes and for their global description we propose to use the “degree of multifractality”. We focus on the verification if the image filtration prior to the calculation of fractal and multifractal parameters may improve their efficiency as image content descriptors. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the coupling of fractal and multifractal features with the image filtration we analyse the class separability measures and the classification accuracy. Our study results indicate that the degree of multifractality improves the classification accuracy in comparison to the fractal dimension.