Evaluation of computer-aided procedure for detecting surface water

Results from an evaluation of a computer-aided procedure for processing ERTS-1 data to detect and locate surface water are presented. The procedure was evaluated using data from a study area in the vicinity of the Lake Somerville area in Washington County, Texas. The procedure consisted of (1) selecting water training fields, (2) aggregating the training samples together and clustering them into unimodal clusters, (3) computing the mean vector and covariance matrix for each cluster, (4) classifying all of the study area into classes corresponding to the clusters using the maximum likelihood classifier, and (5) thresholding out the nonwater pixels.