Glacier mapping based on rough set theory in the Manas River watershed

Precise glacier information is important for assessing climate change in remote mountain areas. To obtain more accurate glacier mapping, rough set theory, which can deal with vague and uncertainty information, was introduced to obtain optimal knowledge rules for glacier mapping. Optical images, thermal infrared band data, texture information and morphometric parameters were combined to build a decision table used in our proposed rough set theory method. After discretizing the real value attributes, decision rules were calculated through the decision rule generation algorithm for glacier mapping. A decision classifier based on the generated rules classified the multispectral image into glacier and non-glacier areas. The result of maximum likelihood classification (MLC) was used to compare with the result of the classification based on the rough set theory. Confusion matrix and visual interpretation were used to evaluate the overall accuracy of the results of the two methods. The accuracies of the rough set method and maximum likelihood classification were compared, yielding overall accuracies of 94.15% and 93.88%, respectively. It showed the area difference based on rough set was smaller by comparing the glacier areas of the rough set method and MLC with visual interpreter, respectively. The high accuracy for glacier mapping and the small area difference for glacier based on rough set theory demonstrated that this method was effective and promising for glacier mapping.