Land-cover Classification and Mapping for Eastern Himalayan State Sikkim

Area of classifying satellite imagery has become a challenging task in current era where there is tremendous growth in settlement i.e. construction of buildings, roads, bridges, dam etc. This paper suggests an improvised k-means and Artificial Neural Network (ANN) classifier for land-cover mapping of Eastern Himalayan state Sikkim. The improvised k-means algorithm shows satisfactory results compared to existing methods that includes k-Nearest Neighbor and maximum likelihood classifier. The strength of the Artificial Neural Network (ANN) classifier lies in the fact that they are fast and have good recognition rate and it’s capability of self-learning compared to other classification algorithms has made it widely accepted. Classifier based on ANN shows satisfactory and accurate result in comparison with the classical method.