On the Choice of the Most Suitable Period to Map Hill Lakes Via Spectral Separability and Object-Based Image Analyses

Technological advances in Earth observation made images characterized by high spatial and temporal resolutions available, nevertheless bringing with them the radiometric heterogeneity of small geographical entities, often also changing in time. Among small geographical entities, hill lakes exhibit a widespread distribution, and their census is sometimes partial or shows unreliable data. High resolution and heterogeneity have boosted the development of geographic object-based image analysis algorithms. This research analyzes which is the most suitable period for acquiring satellite images to identify and delimitate hill lakes. This is achieved by analyzing the spectral separability of the surface reflectance of hill lakes from surrounding bare or vegetated soils and by implementing a semiautomatic procedure to enhance the segmentation phase of a GEOBIA algorithm. The proposed procedure was applied to high spatial resolution satellite images acquired in two different climate periods (arid and temperate), corresponding to dry and vegetative seasons. The segmentation parameters were tuned by minimizing an under- and oversegmentation metric on surfaces and perimeters of hill lakes selected as the reference. The separability of hill lakes from their surrounding was evaluated using Euclidean and divergence metrics both in the arid and temperate periods. The classification accuracy was evaluated by calculating the error matrix and normalized error matrix. Classes’ reflectances in the image acquired in the arid period show the highest average separability (3–4 higher than in the temperate one). The segmentation based on the reference areas performs more than that based on the reference perimeters (metric ≈20% lower). Both separability metrics and classification accuracies indicate that images acquired in the arid period are more suitable than temperate ones to map hill lakes.