Integrating Textural and Spectral Features to Classify Silicate-Bearing Rocks Using Landsat 8 Data

Texture as a measure of spatial features has been useful as supplementary information to improve image classification in many areas of research fields. This study focuses on assessing the ability of different textural vectors and their combinations to aid spectral features in the classification of silicate rocks. Texture images were calculated from Landsat 8 imagery using a fractal dimension method. Different combinations of texture images, fused with all seven spectral bands, were examined using the Jeffries–Matusita (J–M) distance to select the optimal input feature vectors for image classification. Then, a support vector machine (SVM) fusing textural and spectral features was applied for image classification. The results showed that the fused SVM classifier achieved an overall classification accuracy of 83.73%. Compared to the conventional classification method, which is based only on spectral features, the accuracy achieved by the fused SVM classifier is noticeably improved, especially for granite and quartzose rock, which shows an increase of 38.84% and 7.03%, respectively. We conclude that the integration of textural and spectral features is promising for lithological classification when an appropriate method is selected to derive texture images and an effective technique is applied to select the optimal feature vectors for image classification.