Abstract. In recent years, small satellite industry has been a rapid trend and become important especially when associated with operational cost, technology adaptation and the missions. One mission of LAPAN-A2, the 2 nd generation of microsatellite that developed by Indonesian National Institute of Aeronautics and Space (LAPAN), is Earth observation using digital camera that provides imagery with 3.5 m spatial resolution. The aim of this research is to compare between object-based and pixel-based classification of land use/land cover (LU/LC) in order to determine the appropriate classification method in LAPAN-A2 data processing (case study Semarang, Central Java).The LU/LC were classified into eleven classes, as follows: sea, river, fish pond, tree, grass, road, building 1, building 2, building 3, building 4 and rice field. The accuracy of classification outputs were assessed using confusion matrix. The object-based and pixel-based classification methods result for overall accuracy are 31.63% and 61.61%, respectively. According to accuracy result, it was thought that blurring effect on LAPAN-A2 data may be the main cause of accuracy decrease. Furthermore, the result is suggested to use pixel-based classification to be applied in LAPAN-A2 data processing.
Keywords: LAPAN-A2 microsatellite, LU/LC, object-based, pixel-based
INTRODUCTIONThe utilization of small satellite for remote sensing is increasing in recent years. Over the past 50 years, more than 1500 small satellites have been launched worldwide with well-focus on Earth observation missions. More than half of them are classified as micro satellites with the mass between 10 and 100 kg (Sandau and Brieb 2008;Gupta et al. 2016). The term "faster, cheaper and smaller" that addressed to this satellite, generally explains that the microsatellite technology is developed by countries who want to start with effective costs and affordable technology (Vincent et al. 1998;Gardner et al. 1996).The diverse Earth monitoring based on microsatellite data has been done, included: a) hotspot detection, fires and volcanic eruptions (Walter et al. 2005), b) environment monitoring, such as land use classification (Qian 2008), land surface and vegetation analysis (Becker et al. 1996), agriculture, hydrology, urban and coastal area (Laguarde et al. 2010), water quality (Matjafri et al. 2002), global 3D imaging (Yang andYang 2002) and c) disaster monitoring, such as cyclone, flood, drought, landslide, pollution, (Yong et al. 2008;Sandau and Brieb 2008), impending earthquake forecast (Qiang et al. 2000), etc.Microsatellite development is also becoming a concern of Indonesian National Institute of Aeronautics and Space (LAPAN). The mission of LAPAN-A2, as first equatorial microsatellite developed International Journal of Remote Sensing and Earth Sciences Vol. 14 No. 1 June 2017: 27 -36 by LAPAN, are maritime monitoring, disaster mitigation supporting and Earth observing by using RGB matrix camera (Hardhienata et al. 2011). This microsatellite has altitude 650 km the digital space...