Luus, Francois Pierre SarelVan den Bergh, FransMaharaj, Bodhaswar Tikanath Jugpershad2014-04-042014-04-042014-07Luus, FPS, Van Den Bergh, F & Maharaj, BTJ 2014, 'Adaptive threshold-based shadow masking for across-date settlement classification of panchromatic QuickBird images', IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters, vol. 11, no. 6, #6670045, pp. 1153-1157.1545-598X (print)1558-0571 (online)10.1109/LGRS.2013.2288428http://hdl.handle.net/2263/39612Multitemporal land-use analysis is becoming increasingly important for the effective management of earth resources. Despite that, consistent differences in the viewing and illumination geometry in satellite-borne imagery introduce some issues in the creation of land-use classification maps. The focus of this study is settlement classification with high-resolution panchromatic acquisitions, using texture features to distinguish between settlement classes. The important multitemporal variance component of shadow is effectively removed before feature determination, which allows for minimum-supervision across-date classification. Shadow detection based on local adaptive thresholding is employed and experimentally shown to outperform existing fixed threshold shadow detectors in increasing settlement classification accuracy. Both same and across-date settlement accuracies are significantly improved with shadow masking during feature calculation. A statistical study was performed and found to support the hypothesis that the increased accuracy is due to shadow masking specifically.en© 2013 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.Image texture analysisFeature extractionUrban areasRemote sensingHuman settlements -- Remote sensingLand settlement -- Remote sensingPostprint Article