  Land cover classification using multispectral satellite image is a very
challenging task with numerous practical applications. We propose a multi-stage
classifier that involves fuzzy rule extraction from the training data and then
generation of a possibilistic label vector for each pixel using the fuzzy rule
base. To exploit the spatial correlation of land cover types we propose four
different information aggregation methods which use the possibilistic class
label of a pixel and those of its eight spatial neighbors for making the final
classification decision. Three of the aggregation methods use Dempster-Shafer
theory of evidence while the remaining one is modeled after the fuzzy k-NN
rule. The proposed methods are tested with two benchmark seven channel
satellite images and the results are found to be quite satisfactory. They are
also compared with a Markov random field (MRF) model-based contextual
classification method and found to perform consistently better.
