Assessing the potential of integrated Landsat 8 thermal bands, with the traditional reflective bands and derived vegetation indices in classifying urban landscapes

Reliable and up-to-date urban land cover information is valuable in urban planning and policy development. Due to the increasing demand for reliable land cover information there has been a growing need for robust methods and datasets to improve the classification accuracy from remotely sensed imagery. This study sought to assess the potential of the newly launched Landsat 8 sensor's thermal bands and derived vegetation indices in improving land cover classification in a complex urban landscape using the support vector machine classifier. This study compared the individual and combined performance of Landsat 8's reflective, thermal bands and vegetation indices in classifying urban land use-land cover. The integration of Landsat 8 reflective bands, derived vegetation indices and thermal bands overall produced significantly higher accuracy classification results than using traditional bands as standalone (i.e. overall, user and producer accuracies). An overall accuracy above 89.33% and a kappa index of 0.86, significantly higher than the one obtained with the use of the traditional reflective bands as a standalone data-set and other analysis stages. On average, the results also indicate high producer and user accuracies (i.e. above 80%) for most of the classes with a McNemar's Z score of 9.00 at 95% confidence interval showing significant improvement compared with classification using reflective bands as standalone. Overall, the results of this study indicate that the integration of the Landsat 8's OLI and TIR data presents an invaluable potential for accurate and robust land cover classification in a complex urban landscape, especially in areas where the availability of high resolution datasets remains a challenge.