The Digital Earth concept has attracted much attention recently and this approach uses a variety of earth observation data from the global to the local scale.Imaging techniques have made much progress technically and ...The Digital Earth concept has attracted much attention recently and this approach uses a variety of earth observation data from the global to the local scale.Imaging techniques have made much progress technically and the methods used for automatic extraction of geo-ralated information are of importance in Digital Earth science.One of these methods,artificial neural networks(ANN)techniques,have been effectively used in classification of remotely sensed images.Generally image classification with ANN has been producing higher or equal mapping accuracies than parametric methods.Comparative studies have,in fact,shown that there is no discernible difference in classification accuracies between neural and conventional statistical approaches.Only well designed and trained neural networks can present a better performance than the standard statistical approaches.There are,as yet,no widely recognised standard methods to implement an optimum network.From this point of view it might be beneficial to quantify ANN’s reliability in classification problems.To measure the reliability of the neural network might be a way of developing to determine suitable network structures.To date,the problem of confidence estimation of ANN has not been studied in remote sensing studies.A statistical method for quantifying the reliability of a neural network that can be used in image classification is investigated in this paper.For this purpose the method is to be based on a binomial experimentation concept to establish confidence intervals.This novel method can also be used for the selection of an appropriate network structure for the classification of multispectral imagery.Although the main focus of the research is to estimate confidence in ANN,the approach might also be applicable and relevant to Digital Earth technologies.展开更多
文摘The Digital Earth concept has attracted much attention recently and this approach uses a variety of earth observation data from the global to the local scale.Imaging techniques have made much progress technically and the methods used for automatic extraction of geo-ralated information are of importance in Digital Earth science.One of these methods,artificial neural networks(ANN)techniques,have been effectively used in classification of remotely sensed images.Generally image classification with ANN has been producing higher or equal mapping accuracies than parametric methods.Comparative studies have,in fact,shown that there is no discernible difference in classification accuracies between neural and conventional statistical approaches.Only well designed and trained neural networks can present a better performance than the standard statistical approaches.There are,as yet,no widely recognised standard methods to implement an optimum network.From this point of view it might be beneficial to quantify ANN’s reliability in classification problems.To measure the reliability of the neural network might be a way of developing to determine suitable network structures.To date,the problem of confidence estimation of ANN has not been studied in remote sensing studies.A statistical method for quantifying the reliability of a neural network that can be used in image classification is investigated in this paper.For this purpose the method is to be based on a binomial experimentation concept to establish confidence intervals.This novel method can also be used for the selection of an appropriate network structure for the classification of multispectral imagery.Although the main focus of the research is to estimate confidence in ANN,the approach might also be applicable and relevant to Digital Earth technologies.
