Integrating Aerial LiDAR and Very-High-Resolution Images for Urban Functional Zone Mapping

Abstract

This study presents a new approach for Urban Functional Zone (UFZ) mapping by integrating two-dimensional (2D) Urban Structure Parameters (USPs), three-dimensional (3D) USPs, and the spatial patterns of land covers, which can be divided into two steps. Firstly, we extracted various features, i.e., spectral, textural, geometrical features, and 3D USPs from very-high-resolution (VHR) images and light detection and ranging (LiDAR) point clouds. In addition, the multi-classifiers (MLCs), i.e., Random Forest, K-Nearest Neighbor, and Linear Discriminant Analysis classifiers were used to perform the land cover mapping by using the optimized features. Secondly, based on the land cover classification results, we extracted 2D and 3D USPs for different land covers and used MLCs to classify UFZs. Results for the northern part of Brooklyn, New York, USA, show that the approach yielded an excellent accuracy of UFZ mapping with an overall accuracy of 91.9%. Moreover, we have demonstrated that 3D USPs could considerably improve the classification accuracies of UFZs and land covers by 6.4% and 3.0%, respectively.