Comparison of Classification Techniques on Fused Optical and SAR Images for Shoreline Extraction: A Case Study at Northeast Coast of Peninsular Malaysia

Shoreline is a very important element to identify exact boundary at the coastal areas of a country. However, in order to identify land-water boundary for a large region using traditional ground survey technique is very time consuming. Alternatively, shoreline can be extracted by using satellite images that minimizes the mapping errors. The trend of extracting shoreline has been shifted from image processing to machine learning and data mining techniques. By using machine learning technique, the satellite images could be classified into land and water classes in order to extract shoreline. However, the result is meaningless if it has cloud and shadow on the water-land boundary. In this study, we compare the accuracy and Kappa Coefficient of six machine learning techniques namely Maximum Likelihood, Minimum Distance, Mahalanobis Distance, Parallelepiped, Neural Network and Support Vector Machines on three type of images; single optical multispectral, single SAR and fused image. A case study for this research is done alongside Tumpat beach, located at the Northeast Coast of Peninsular Malaysia. All the machine learning techniques have been tested on the three types of images. The experimental results show that classification using SVM on single multispectral image has the highest accuracy among all. However, the classified of fused image using SVM is considered much more accurate because it can cater the cloud and shadow problem. Additionally, the classification on 5 and 10 m fused images also tested and the result shows that with the increase of spatial resolution of fused image, the classification accuracy also increases.