| In recent years, coral reefs around the world have faced massive degradation due to anthropogenic and natural factors, and
coral reef monitoring studies play an important role in coral reef ecosystem assessment, restoration and conservation. In this paper, Bei Reef
and Huaguang Reef of Xisha Islands are taken as the study areas and Gaofen-2(GF-2)and WorldView-2 high spatial resolution images
and field survey data in 2015 are applied. Based on spatial location characteristics of different coral reef geomorphic units, a high -
resolution remote sensing classification method of integrating Geo-Spatial Cognition(GSC) is proposed. The results of classification showed: Aiming at the problems of omission and misclassification caused by different spatial positions and highly similar sediment composition, the
proposed classification method is more effective in obtaining accurate information on coral reef geomorphic units. Integrating Geo-Spatial
Cognition-Random Forest(GSC-RF) method showed the best classification performance, with an overall accuracy of 98.06% and 91.93%
in Bei Reef and Huaguang Reef, respectively, and the Kappa coefficient is 0.98 and 0.91, respectively. Compared with the classical
classification methods of Random Forest(RF), Multinomial Logistic Regression(MLR) and Support Vector Machine(SVM), which only
use spectral information. The proposed method improves the overall classification accuracy of the Bei Reef and Huaguang Reef by 14%-
25% and 6%-15%, respectively. The new method can significantly improve the classification accuracy of coral reef geomorphic units and
provide technical support for fine monitoring of coral reefs on a large scale. |