Land Use / Land Cover Classification

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Land cover is the biophysical description of the earth's surface and is directly observable, whereas land use is the documentation of human uses of the landscape and is not directly observable. There are many uses for Land Use / Land Cover (LULC) classification, such as urban planning, natural resource inventories, Utilities, and many more. 

In this lab, we were given a natural color aerial photograph of an area in Pascagoula, MS and asked to create a LULC map based on the aerial imagery. We then generated 30 sample points and used Google Street View to "ground-truth" these points to see if our classifications matched what was observed on the ground. Below is the completed LULC map along with 30 sample points. Green points indicate areas that were mapped correctly, and red points indicate areas that were mapped incorrectly. The overall accuracy of this maps is 66.66%. 



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