Comparing ten classification methods for burned area mapping in a Mediterranean environment using Landsat TM satellite data

Various methods have been developed during the past three decades to improve the classification accuracy in burned area mapping using satellite data captured by different sensors. In this article, we compare ten such classification approaches using Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) imagery on three Mediterranean test sites by evaluating the classification accuracy using (i) a traditional pixel-based approach, (ii) the concept of the Pareto boundary of efficient solution and (iii) linear regression analysis. Additionally, we make a discrimination of errors depending on their distribution and causal factor. The classification approaches compared resulted in not statistically significant differences in the accuracy of the burned area maps. Differences between the methods were also observed when considering the accuracy along the edges of the burned patches; however, again these were not statistically significant. The findings of our study in a Mediterranean environment clearly demonstrate that, for the selection of the most suitable classification approach, other factors could be given more weight, such as computational resources, imagery characteristics, availability of ancillary data, available software and the analyst's experience. Maybe the most important finding of our work is that the variance imposed by the methods is less than the variance imposed by factors differentiated locally in the three study sites since the between-group variance of the overall accuracy is higher than that of the within groups.