Abstract
Land Use and Land Cover (LULC) maps play an important role in an environmental modelling, and for many years efforts have been made to improve and streamline the expensive mapping process. The aim of the study was to create LULC maps of three selected water catchment areas in South Poland using a Geographic Object-Based Image Analysis (GEOBIA) in order to highlight the advantages of this innovative, semi-automatic method of image analysis. the classification workflow included: multi-stage and multi-scale analyses based on a data fusion approach. Input data consisted mainly of BlackBridge (RapidEye) high resolution satellite imagery, although for distinguishing particular LULC classes, additional satellite images (LANDSAT TM5) and GIS-vector data were used. Accuracy assessment of GEOBIA classification results varied from 0.83 to 0.87 (kappa), depending on the specific catchment area. The main recognized advantages of GEOBIA in the case study were: performing of multi-stage and multi-scale image classification using different features for specific LULC classes and the ability to using knowledge-based classification in conjunction with the data fusion approach in an efficient and reliable manner.