Two phenomena of similar objects with different spectra and different objects with similar spectrum often result in the difficulty of separation and identification of all types of geographical objects only using spectral information. Therefore, there is a need to incorporate spatial structural and spatial association properties of the surfaces of objects into image processing to improve the accuracy of classification of remotely sensed imagery. In the current article, a new method is proposed on the basis of the principle of multiple-point statistics for combining spectral information and spatial information for image classification. The method was validated by applying to a case study on road extraction based on Landsat TM taken over the Chinese Yellow River delta on August 8, 1999. The classification results have shown that this new method provides overall better results than the traditional methods such as maximum likelihood classifier （MLC）.
In the supervised classification process of remotely sensed imagery, the quantity of samples is one of the important factors affecting the accuracy of the image classification as well as the keys used to evaluate the image classification. In general, the samples are acquired on the basis of prior knowledge, experience and higher resolution images. With the same size of samples and the same sampling model, several sets of training sample data can be obtained. In such sets, which set reflects perfect spectral characteristics and ensure the accuracy of the classification can be known only after the accuracy of the classification has been assessed. So, before classification, it would be a meaningful research to measure and assess the quality of samples for guiding and optimizing the consequent classification process. Then, based on the rough set, a new measuring index for the sample quality is proposed. The experiment data is the Landsat TM imagery of the Chinese Yellow River Delta on August 8th, 1999. The experiment compares the Bhattacharrya distance matrices and purity index zl and △x based on rough set theory of 5 sample data and also analyzes its effect on sample quality.
