Discrimination of Coastal Sandy Areas in the West of Bushehr Province by ETM+ Images Of Landsat 7

Abstract
  In order to study the usability of landsat 7 data for discrimination of coastal sandy areas in the west of Bushehr province an area were selected which exactly located in land number NH39-10 of sari K55-1 on topographical map (scale = 1:250000) of Genaweh. In the first step, by using of topographical map, aerial photographs, field study, and GPS, the total surface of the sandy area were calculated 1766 hectares and this map was digitized. Geographical error of ETM+ images of April, 2000 were corrected and georeferenced. Different processing including color composites study was applied and the best color composites were visually selected. In the next step the ground truth and color composites were overlaid. Processing of images showed the surface of sandy areas 1500 hectares that in comparison to the ground truth map the overall accuracy was 84.9 %. The accuracy was low because the pixel value of low vegetated areas was similar to coastal sandy areas.
   This accuracy for discrimination of coastal sandy areas from other phenomena such as sea is satisfying. In order to get better results for southern coastal areas, more image processing including rationing, OIF calculation to find the best image combinations, Jeffrey's matzos method, Linear stretch, density slicing, unsupervised and supervised classification (different classification methods) such as maximum likelihood is needed.

Key words: Coastal Sandy Iand Discrimination, West Province of Bushehr, Coastal  Areas,  ETM+data, Landsat 7.