Rural Settlement Subdivision by Using Landscape Metrics as Spatial Contextual Information

Multiple policy projects have changed land use and land cover (LULC) in China’s rural regions over the past years, resulting in two types of rural settlements: new-fashioned and old-fashioned. Precise extraction of and discrimination between these two settlement types are vital for sustainable land use development. It is difficult to identify these two types via remote sensing images due to their similarities in spectrum, texture, and geometry. This study attempts to discriminate different types of rural settlements by using a spatial contextual information extraction method based on Gaofen 2 (GF-2) images, which integrate hierarchical multi-scale segmentation and landscape analysis. A preliminary LULC map was derived by using only traditional spectral and geometrical features from a finer scale. Subsequently, a vertical connection was built between superobjects and subobjects, and landscape metrics were computed. The vertical connection was used for assigning landscape contextual information to subobjects. Finally, a classification phase was conducted, in which only multi-scale contextual information was adopted, to discriminate between new-fashioned and old-fashioned rural settlements. Compared with previous studies on multi-scale contextual information, this paper employs landscape metrics to quantify contextual characteristics, rather than traditional spectral, textural, and topological relationship information, from superobjects. Our findings indicate that this approach effectively identified and discriminated two types of rural settlements, with accuracies over 80% for both producers and users. A comparison with a conventional top-down hierarchical classification scheme showed that this novel approach improved accuracy, precision, and recall. Our results confirm that multi-scale contextual information with landscape metrics provides valuable spatial information for classification, and indicates the practicability, applicability, and effectiveness of this synthesized approach in distinguishing different types of rural settlements.