Classification of remote sensed data using Artificial Bee Colony algorithm

The present study employs the traditional swarm intelligence technique in the classification of satellite data since the traditional statistical classification technique shows limited success in classifying remote sensing data. The traditional statistical classifiers examine only the spectral variance ignoring the spatial distribution of the pixels corresponding to the land cover classes and correlation between various bands. The Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm based upon swarm intelligence which is used to characterise spatial variations within imagery as a means of extracting information forms the basis of object recognition and classification in several domains avoiding the issues related to band correlation. The results indicate that ABC algorithm shows an improvement of 5% overall classification accuracy at 6 classes over the traditional Maximum Likelihood Classifier (MLC) and Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and 3% against support vector machine.