Land-use classification of Zhanghe river basin using the maximum likelihood and decision tree method

For Zhanghe areas, we utilized the Landsat5 TM images of 2010 to complete the region´s land use classification based on the maximum likelihood method. Analyzing the constraints of land use classification in the research area, our classification method includes 4 aspects: cloud and hillshade were classified at first and then reprocessed separately; water body was classified combining supervised classification and interactive interpretation; cities and villages were distinguished based on prior knowledge; the slope hierarchy of arable land was accomplished by slope of the study area based on decision tree. 67% of regions of interest (ROIs) were randomly selected for sample training, while the rest 33% of ROIs participated in confusion matrix validation. The experiment shows that the classification accuracy is 91.50% and the Kappa coefficient is 0.8587.