Applied Soft Computing 30 (2015) 1–13

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Applied Soft Computing

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/asoc

Using an unsupervised approach of Probabilistic Neural Network

(PNN) for land use classification from multitemporal satellite images
Jawad Iounousse ∗ , Salah Er-Raki, Ahmed El Motassadeq, Hassan Chehouani
LP2M2E, Faculty of Sciences and Techniques, Cadi Ayyad University, Marrakesh, Morocco

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: The aim of this work is to develop an unsupervised approach based on Probabilistic Neural Network
Received 22 July 2013 (PNN) for land use classification. A time series of high spatial resolution acquired by LANDSAT and SPOT
Received in revised form 6 November 2014 images has been used to firstly generate the profiles of Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI)
Accepted 21 January 2015
and then used for the classification procedure.
Available online 30 January 2015
The proposed method allows the implementation of cluster validity technique in PNN using Ward’s
method to get clusters. This procedure is completely automatic with no parameter adjusting and instan-
Keywords:
taneous training, has high ability in producing a good cluster number estimates and provides a new point
Unsupervised classification
Probabilistic Neural Network
of view to use PNN as unsupervised classifier. The obtained results showed that this approach gives an
Ward’s method accurate classification with about 3.44% of error through a comparison with the real land use and pro-
Cluster validity index vides a better performance when comparing to usual unsupervised classification methods (fuzzy c-means
Land use (FCM) and K-means).
LANDSAT and SPOT images © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction learning methods is to develop classification labels automatically.

The classification is one of the most useful tasks of human behav-
ior. It aims at identifying groups of similar objects in the sense of
a homogeneity criterion and therefore helps to discover the distri-
bution of patterns and interesting correlations in large data sets.
Its application has an important role for resolving many problems
in pattern recognition [1], imaging, color image segmentation [2],
data mining [3] and in different domains such as medicine [4], biol-
ogy [5,6], marketing [7], energy [8], remote sensing especially land
use [9–11], etc.
There are two main methods used for classification: supervised
and unsupervised. In the first one, the user defines the classes
which can be conceived as a finite set. The main task is to search
the patterns and then construct their corresponding mathemati-
cal models. The consistency of those models is evaluated based on
the actual data. The most used supervised classification methods
are: maximum likelihood classification (MLC) [12], parallelepiped
method (PP) [13] and fuzzy sets [14-18], neural networks (NNs)
[19,20], support vector machines (SVM) [21,22] and computational
intelligence [23]. In other hand, the basic task of unsupervised
∗ Corresponding author. Tel.: +212 524 43 34 04.
E-mail addresses: iounousse@gmail.com (J. Iounousse),
s.erraki@gmail.com (S. Er-Raki), motassadeq@gmail.com (A. El Motassadeq),
chehouani@fstg-marrakech.ac.ma (H. Chehouani).
Unsupervised algorithms seek out similarity between pieces of data
in order to determine whether they can be characterized as form-
ing groups labeled clusters. In remote sensing for example, the
unsupervised methods commonly used are split-and-merge [24],
ISODATA [25], K-means, fuzzy c-means (FCM) [26,27], NNs based
methods [28,29] and scale space techniques [30].
Zhang [31] reported that the classification is the most inves-
tigated topic of NNs. Furthermore, it has been noted that NNs
are a promising alternatives to various conventional classification
methods. The advantages of using NNs are due to the following
theoretical aspects. First, NNs are self-adaptive methods as they
can adjust themselves to data without any explicit specification
of functional or distributional form for their underlying structure.
The user can adjust parameters of learning by setting up the initial
weights of the network and selecting the correct number of hid-
den layers and nodes at each layer. Second, NNs can approximate
any function with arbitrary accuracy [32–34]. So, any classifica-
tion procedure seeks a functional relationship between the group
membership and the attributes of the object. In fact, if the user
disposes of different networks with a variety of methods using a
multivariate training data formats, it can be easy to get an accu-
rate identification of this underlying function. Finally, NNs are able
to estimate the posterior probabilities using the Bayes rule. These
probabilities provide the basis to establish classification rule and
perform statistical analysis [35]. For classification tasks, the Prob-
abilistic Neural Network (PNN) is one of the most used NN. It is

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.asoc.2015.01.037
1568-4946/© 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
2 J. Iounousse et al. / Applied Soft Computing 30 (2015) 1–13

a special form of radial basis function NN (RBFNN). In addition, it

is considered as an implementation of the Bayes optimal decision
rule in the NN form based on nearest neighbor classifiers [36,37].
Several recent studies [4,8,38–46] used PNN for classification and
showed that this method provides satisfactory results if the ini-
tial target classes are defined correctly. In this way, finding the
basis function centers (classes) with their appropriate number is an
important step to achieve suitable classification. This can be proved
by several reasons as cited by Tsekouras and Tsimikas [47]. First, the
activation of each hidden node depends exclusively on the distance
between the center and the current input vector. Second, in the
neuron construction, the distribution of neuron’s receptive fields
across the feature space is strongly linked to the locations of the
respective centers. Third, the underlying data structure is revealed
by these centers. They affect directly the following neurons output.
Fourth, the estimation of the widths directly depends on the loca-
tions of the centers. The classification performance depends heavily
on selecting appropriate spread values. Too small spread values
give very spiky Probability Density Functions (PDFs) whereas too
large spread values smooth out the details. The idea of using clus-
tering algorithms in training RBFNN design has been addressed
by several authors [47–55]. Pedrycz [50] applied the conditional
fuzzy clustering (modified FCM) in the input space. This method has
embedded the output data using the clusters weights calculated as
feedback information into the input mechanism. Uykan et al. [55]
employed the K-means model and showed that the main impact Fig. 1. Overview of the study area (false color composition).
of the input–output clustering is the minimization of an upper
bound of network’s mean square error. Staiano et al. [54] used fuzzy
clustering to generate the clusters in the input space and for each
cluster established an input–output relationship through a local by LANDSAT and SPOT to build land use map. Finally, the obtained
linear regression models. Tsekouras and Tsimikas [47] proposed an results are then validated with the real land use and compared with
algorithm to select the optimal values for the basis function centers the results of usual classification methods (FCM and K-means).
of RBFNN. This algorithm uses the output space to adjust the input
partition by combining input–output fuzzy clustering and particle
swarm optimization. 2. Study area and data description
Based on the state-of-the-art cited above, it seems that the
major challenge in clustering is to determine the optimal number The region of interest is an irrigated area located in the Haouz
of clusters to better fit a data set. In the most clustering methods, plain in the center of the Tensift basin (Central Morocco), 40 km
experimental evaluations of 2D/3D-data sets are used in order to east of Marrakech city. The climate is of semi-arid Mediterranean
visually check the validity of the results (i.e. how well the clustering type with an average annual precipitation of about 250 mm of
algorithm discovers the clusters of the data set). But in the case of which 70% falls during winter and spring. The area covers about
large multidimensional (more than three dimensions) data sets like 2800 ha and is mostly flat. It has been extensively studied during
multidimensional remote sensing images, effective visualization of the 2002–2003, 2003–2004 and 2005–2006 agricultural seasons
the data set would be difficult. Moreover, the perception of clus- [69–72]. The main land cover classes are cereals; mostly wheat,
ters using available visualization tools is a difficult task for humans then barley and a significant portion is left in fallow or not culti-
that are not accustomed to higher dimensional spaces and complex vated (Fig. 1). More details about the study area and the climate of
sets of data. To overcome this problem, many techniques based on region can be found in [68–72]. The vegetation development in this
cluster analysis have been developed in order to group either the area is affected by a great inter-annual and/or intra-annual hetero-
data or the variables into clusters. To do so, many criteria have geneity [72]. Then, the land cover maps required annual update.
been described like partitioning methods, hierarchical clustering, Therefore, the effort was directed toward the development of land
etc. One of the most widespread hierarchical clustering methods is cover classification methods based on remote sensing data. A time
the Ward’s method [56–64]. According to Hands and Everitt [64], series of images acquired by SPOT and LANDSAT was collected dur-
this method achieves good results than other hierarchical meth- ing the growing season of wheat (November 2002–June 2003) in
ods (single-link, complete linkage, median, average linkage, etc.) order to extract vegetation profiles. Due to cloudiness or uncer-
especially when the group proportions are approximately equal. tainty in atmospheric corrections, only seven images have been
In this paper, we design an unsupervised approach for land clas- used in this study. These images with the size of 122,500 pixels
sification. It is based on a different way to implement the clustering arranged in 350 columns and 350 rows were radiometrically cali-
in PNN (RBFNN design). The Ward’s method [56] is used in training brated and atmospherically corrected based on the reflectance of an
the input targets. A cluster validity function, generally applied on invariant objects and transformed to NDVI maps [72]. The NDVI was
fuzzy clustering [65–67], is developed in the hidden layer output derived from red and near infrared reflectance bands as follows:
space of PNN by varying the number of classes to find the optimal
number of clusters. The proposed model is firstly tested for Fischer’s NIR − RED
NDVI = (1)
Iris data set [75,76], synthetic grayscale and RGB digital images. NIR + RED
The consistency of this approach is assessed through a comparison
with FCM clustering using the concept of cluster analysis. After, this where NIR and RED are the reflectance measured in the near-
approach is applied for time series remote sensing images acquired infrared and red band respectively.
 J. Iounousse et al. / Applied Soft Computing 30 (2015) 1–13 3

Fig. 2. Architecture of the PNN.

Fig. 3. Flowchart of the automation procedure for PNN.
3. Description of Probabilistic Neural Network

Introduced in 1990 by Specht [36,37], the Probabilistic Neural
Networks (PNNs) are based on the concept of utilizing a non-
parametric estimator (Parzen window) for obtaining multivariate
probability density estimates. In contrast to classical RBFs, PNNs
are only used for classification and they compute conditional class
probabilities p (class k/x) for each of C classes. A typical PNN consists
of an input layer, a pattern layer (hidden layer) and a competitive
output layer. The structure of a PNN is shown in Fig. 2. Similar to
RBFs, PNNs receive D-dimensional feature vectors x = (x1 ,. . .,xD ) as
input. This input vector is applied to the input neurons xi (1 ≤ i ≤ D)
and is passed to the neurons in the hidden layer. Here, the hidden
nodes are collected into groups: one group for each of the C classes.
Each hidden node in the group for class k (1 ≤ k ≤ C) corresponds
to a Gaussian function centered on its associated feature vector in
the kth class (there is a Gaussian for each exemplar feature vector)
called Probability Density Function (PDF). PDF for a single sample
xk is written as follows:
1 2 )/(2 2 ))
fk (x) = e−((||x−xk ||
D/2
(2) D
where  is the smoothing parameter for Gaussians, D is the dimen-
sion of the input vector x and ||x − xk || = i (x − xk )2 is the Euclidean
distance between vectors x and xk . All of the Gaussians in a class
group feed their functional values to the same output layer node for
that class, so there are C output nodes. The kth output node sums
these multivariate densities to produce a vector of probabilities
representing the average of the PDF’s for C samples:
site better than other networks like Multilayer Perceptron (MLP)
and RBFNN. Furthermore, the accuracy of the PNN classification
could be increased through the incorporation of prior probabilities
of class membership. However, the accuracy of each classification
could also be degraded by the presence of an untrained class [73].
Thus, it is essential to choose the appropriate classes.
4. Automation of PNN classification
PNN algorithm requires initially setting of the modes (centers of
the Gaussian functions), which are not evident to find. The choice
of modes and their number should be without errors. An eval-
uation methodology is required to determine and to choose the
optimal number of clusters C*. This method is usually called the
cluster validity. To make PNN automatic, we used the summation
of PDFs in the output of its hidden layer which takes the form of a
matrix of probabilities. This matrix will allow to calculate the valid-
ity index (V) according to the variation of the class number C in a
(2) given interval [Cmin ; Cmax ] in order to determine the adequate num-
ber of clusters. Cmin and Cmax are respectively the minimum and
maximum number of possible classes fixed firstly by the user. The
optimal number of classes is obtained when V reaches its maximum
value. The flowchart (Fig. 3) illustrates the developed automation

1 
C
2 )/(2 2 ))
pk (x) = e−((||x−xk || (3)
D/2
(2) DC
k=1

Finally, a competitive transfer function gives 1 for the input class

which has the maximum joint PDF and 0 for all other classes. An
unknown input x belongs to class k if: pk (x) > pk (x) for all k =
/ k.
Therefore, the neuron in the decision layer determines the class
belongingness of the pattern x by (4) in accordance with Bayes’s
decision rule under the following assumption:

c(x) = argmax{pk (x)}, k = 1, 2, . . ., C (4)

where c(x) is the estimated class of the pattern x.

PNN is commonly used as supervised classifier in various appli-
cations but it is less exploited in remote sensing. Foody [73] proved Fig. 4. Flowchart describing the functional steps of the automation procedure for
that PNN was able to accurately map land cover for an agricultural PNN.
4 J. Iounousse et al. / Applied Soft Computing 30 (2015) 1–13
procedure for PNN. Fig. 4 describes its functional stages as summa-
rized in the following steps:
(1) Proceed by hierarchical agglomerative classification using
Ward’s method applied to input data for obtaining the C clus-
ters.
(2) Apply the PNN algorithm by implementing the C clusters as
targets input founded in step 1.
(3) Calculate V corresponding to the obtained classification. V
requires the values of the probability matrix produced in the
output of PNN’s hidden layer (see Section 4.2).
(4) Repeat step 1 for different cases of C. The number of classes C
can be chosen in an interval [Cmin ; Cmax ]. Otherwise, all possible
numbers of classes are taken.
(5) Select the optimal number C* of clusters corresponding to max-
imum value of V.
4.1. Ward’s method for defining the centers of Gaussian functions
In statistics, Ward’s method [56] is a criterion applied in hierar-
chical agglomerative clustering. This method consists in providing
a set of partitions into less detailed classes obtained by combin-
ing successively the parties. The idea is to build a dendrogram or a
tree of data that successively merges similar groups of points. This
dendrogram is obtained by hierarchical ascending: We combine at
first the two closest elements which form a “summit”. It remains
only (n − 1) objects and we iterate the process until a complete
group. The general pseudo code of the hierarchical agglomerative
clustering is writing as follow:
(1) Begin with N clusters, each containing one object and number
the clusters 1 through N.
(2) Compute the between-cluster distance dist(A, B) as the
between-object distance of the two objects in A and B respec-
tively with A, B = 1, 2, . . ., n. Let the square matrix D = dist(A,
B). If the objects are represented by vectors, use the Euclidean
distance.
(3) Find the most similar pair of clusters r and s, such that the
distance dist(A, B) is minimal among all the pairwise distances.
(4) Merge A and B to a new cluster C and compute the between-
cluster distance dist(C, k) for any existing cluster k =/ A, B. Once
the distances are obtained, delete the rows and columns corre-
sponding to the old cluster A and B in the D matrix, since A and
B do not exist anymore. Then add a new row and column in D
corresponding to cluster C.
(5) Repeat Step 3 a total of N − 1 times until there is only one cluster
left.
Ward’s method is distinct from other methods because it uses
an analysis of variance approach to evaluate the distances between
clusters and therefore it is very efficient. At each stage, the Ward
objective is to find those two clusters whose merger gives the mini-
mum increase in the total error sum of squares of the within-group
(or distances between the centroids of the merged clusters). The
Ward distance used between two classes is the distance of their
centroids squared, weighted by the size of the two clusters. It is
defined as follows:
pA pB 2
dist(A, B) = d (gA , gB ) (5)
pA + pB
where gA and gB are the gravity centers of classes A and B with the
weight pA and pB .
Because the Ward method minimizes the sum of within-group
sums of squares (squared error criterion), the clusters tend to
be hyperspherical, i.e. spherical in multidimensional D-space, and
to contain roughly equal numbers of objects if the observations
are evenly distributed through D-space. This criterion is the most
accurate in hierarchical ascending clustering on Euclidean data par-
ticularly when the elements are close. In this paper, we used the
Ward’s method to obtain the Gaussian functions centers in the hid-
den layer. In order to reduce the overlap of the centers, the widths
of the radial basis functions are locally determined using a spread
equal to the half of the minimum distance between the neighbor
centers.
4.2. Proposed cluster validity index for the optimal number of
modes
Cluster analysis aims at identifying groups of similar objects,
therefore helps to discover interesting distribution of patterns and
correlations in large data sets. Most of clustering algorithms need
to know the right number of classes C*. However, it is generally dif-
ficult to predict this number for accurate separation of data set. If
it is too large, one or more good compact clusters may be broken.
In contrast, if it is too small, more than one separate cluster may be
merged. The problem for finding C* is usually called cluster valid-
ity. A large number of cluster validity indices are available in the
literature [65–67,74]. In this paper, the proposed cluster validity
function is inspired from the Dave’s Modified Partition Coefficient
(MPC) used for fuzzy partition [74]. MPC is defined as:
N C
C j=1 i=1
(uij )m − N
MPC(C, U, N) = (6)
N(C − 1)
where m is the fuzzification coefficient, N the number of vectors to
be classified, C the number of classes and uij is the element of the
partition matrix U of size C × N representing the membership of the
pattern xj to the cluster Ci .
Before introducing the proposed cluster validity index V, we
first use the summation of Gaussians produced by the computed
clusters at the output of PNN’s hidden layer (see Section 3). This
latter retrieves the probability matrix P = [pjk ]C×N which represents
the membership of the kth vector to the jth data input. As P takes
the same form of U in Eq. (6) and the PNN’s competitive func-
tion reaches the maximum of these probabilities, V is given by the
following equation:
N
C j=1
max1≤k≤C (pkj ) − N
V (C, P, N) = (7)
N(C − 1)
where P = [pjk ]C×N is the matrix membership in the output of PNN’s
hidden layer representing the kth vector of probabilities for the jth
data input and max (P) is the maximum value of P associated to each
input. In others words, max (P) represents the closest cluster to the
input. The values of V range in [0; 1]. By varying C, the maximum
proposed index corresponds to the optimal distribution of clusters
and produces the best clustering performance for the dataset.
4.3. Tests and comparison
We realized different tests to different types of data. We started
with the famous Fischer’s Iris dataset then we tested the method to
simple case of synthetic grayscale image and finally to digital RGB
images. All results are compared with results of the FCM clustering
algorithm using the same concept of cluster validity.
4.3.1. Test using Fischer’s Iris dataset
This dataset contains random samples of flowers belonging to
three species of iris flowers setosa, versicolor and virginica [75,76].
For each of the species, fifty observations for four features (sepal
length, sepal width, petal length and petal width) are recorded. We
applied the proposed algorithm and FCM clustering by choosing the
 J. Iounousse et al. / Applied Soft Computing 30 (2015) 1–13 5

Table 1 Table 4
Variability of cluster validity indexes with C for Fischer’s Iris dataset. Variability of cluster validity indexes with C for image of Moroccan tile.

C classes 2 3 4 5 6 C classes 3 4 5 6 7 8

V (PNN) 0.681 0.697 0.591 0.605 0.628 V (PNN) 0.878 0.881 0.882 0.792 0.753 0.777
MPC (FCM) 0.663 0.675 0.609 0.531 0.528 MPC (FCM) 0.810 0.844 0.829 0.812 0.799 0.791

Table 2 4.3.4. Comparison between clustering using FCM and PNN

The correct samples of iris flowers detected and the accuracy. We tested the same concept of cluster validity for FCM and PNN
Methods Setosa Versicolor Virginica Accuracy on different types of data. The results (Figs. 5 and 6 and Tables 2–4)
showed that the proposed method gives the appropriate number
Automatic PNN 50 48 36 89.33%
Automatic FCM 50 47 33 86.66% of classes where the FCM technique fails. Regardless the number of
channels in an image, the proposed method was able to distinguish
between different classes. From these performed tests, we can see
Table 3 that the unsupervised PNN is a valid reliable classifier.
Variability of cluster validity indexes with C for synthetic grayscale image.

C classes 3 4 5 6 7 8 5. Application and results

V (PNN) 0.721 0.752 0.741 0.734
MPC (FCM) 0.706 0.728 0.701 0.785
number of classes C in the range [Cmin = 2; Cmax = 6]. Table 1 sum-
marized the obtained results. Both of the methods give the optimal
cluster number estimate C* = 3 for the Iris data set. But the differ-
ence is in the classification accuracy. Table 2 shows the detected
samples of the three Iris flowers and the accuracy of classification
using the two algorithms with a notable advantage of the proposed
PNN classifier.
4.3.2. Test using synthetic grayscale image
We tested the proposed method on a synthetic image repre-
senting a gradient of eight levels of gray. In this case, we choose
a number of classes C in the range [Cmin = 3; Cmax = 10] to see if
the algorithm is capable to determine the exact number of classes.
Table 3 summarized the obtained results by the unsupervised PNN
and FCM. The maximum validity index (0.969) corresponds to class
number of C* = 8 for the proposed approach while C* = 7 for FCM
clustering. Fig. 5 represents the original and the classified images
using the two methods. We can note easily that FCM has detected
a false number of classes.
4.3.3. Test using digital RGB image
In this case, we increase the color space to three channels (Red,
Green and Blue). We used RGB image of Moroccan tile which con-
tains five colors to show if the proposed algorithm is able to give
the exact number of colors and to perform meaningful classifica-
tion. The range of C chosen is [Cmin = 2; Cmax = 8]. The results are
illustrated in Table 4 and represented in Fig. 6.
0.844 0.969
0.894 0.878 After testing and comparing the proposed approach with FCM
clustering over several data sets (Fischer’s iris data, grayscale and
RGB digital images), this approach is applied for a sequence of seven
time series of NDVI remote sensing images acquired by LANDSAT
and SPOT to build land use map. The obtained results of land cover
are compared with the real data collected by land sampling in the
framework of VALERI Program [72,77].
For large data sets like multi-layer remote sensing images, it
is desirable to firstly apply spatial classification scene by scene in
order to reduce the number of color. Then the results are classified
in time.
To use an image as feature vector of PNN input, a serialization
procedure is applied to transform the matrix image to a vector
(taken row by row or column by column) providing that the oppo-
site transformation is done to restore the output classified image.
5.1. Spatial classification
We applied the proposed model to each image of the seven
NDVI scenes for different number of classes C in the range [Cmin = 5;
Cmax = 15]. We chose the value 5 as the minimum of classes accord-
ing to the minimum diversity of the land in the studied area [72]:
bare soil, cereals, trees, trees with herbs, fallow, etc. The maximum
number of classes chosen is the value 15 in order to represent more
levels of NDVI and to keep the majority of the information from
each scene. Table 5 showed for each scene the optimal number of
classes C* obtained by comparing V values. Table 6 presents the
number of classes obtained in each scene before and after spatial
classification. The obtained results showed that after the classifi-
cation, the scenes with a narrow histogram (7 Nov 2002, 25 Dec
2002 and 27 Jun 2003) took 5 as the minimum number of classes
while the scenes with a large histogram (26 Jan 2003, 11 Feb 2003,

Fig. 5. (a) synthetic grayscale image. Classified images: (b) using automatic FCM, (c) using automatic PNN.
6 J. Iounousse et al. / Applied Soft Computing 30 (2015) 1–13

Fig. 6. (a) RGB image of Moroccan tile. Classified images: (b) using automatic FCM, (c) using automatic PNN.

Table 5
Variability of V with C for each NDVI scene.

Number of classes C

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

V for each scene

7 Nov 0.882 0.772 0.705 0.673 0.709 0.771 0.711 0.724 0.684 0.677 0.659
25 Dec 0.755 0.670 0.671 0.656 0.664 0.696 0.663 0.668 0.677 0.710 0.694
26 Jan 0.693 0.632 0.684 0.695 0.707 0.717 0.711 0.712 0.721 0.713 0.698
11 Feb 0.710 0.646 0.666 0.693 0.699 0.708 0.714 0.705 0.695 0.706 0.695
31 Mar 0.656 0.682 0.683 0.702 0.707 0.716 0.711 0.714 0.721 0.711 0.714
18 May 0.630 0.648 0.669 0.663 0.667 0.698 0.670 0.689 0.683 0.716 0.715
27 Jun 0.853 0.690 0.650 0.705 0.700 0.696 0.685 0.690 0.690 0.667 0.721

Table 6
The effect of classification on number of levels in NDVI values for the 7 scenes.

NDVI scenes 7 Nov 02 25 Dec 02 26 Jan 03 11 Feb 03 31 Mar 03 18 May 03 27 Jun 03

Number of levels in the original scene 73 75 77 75 82 77 87

Number of levels after classification 5 5 13 11 13 14 5

31 Mar 2003 and 18 May 2003) took a number of classes greater
than 10 (Fig. 7). It is logical and reasonable because in the wheat
agricultural season, there is less verdure density in the period from
7 November to 25 December corresponding to cultivation period
and harvest (after 27 June) while the period from 26 January to 18
May representing the growth phase showed more verdure density
and several types of crops (wheat, barley, fallow, etc.).
The spatial classification adopted here is a compression strategy
which reduces the number of levels of NDVI values in each scene
without affecting the information contained in it. Therefore, the
number of NDVI temporal combinations is reduced from 121,493
to 4619 allowing a minimization of the running process time in the
following stage.
5.2. Temporal classification
To extract the different temporal behavior of NDVI, we applied
the proposed algorithm to the time series of seven scenes spatially
classified. Cluster validity index V by varying C in the range [Cmin = 5;
Cmax = 15] is represented in Table 7. As shown in this table, the max-
imum value of V is about 0.99 which corresponds to fifteen classes.
 J. Iounousse et al. / Applied Soft Computing 30 (2015) 1–13 7

Fig. 7. Histograms of the 7 scenes.

Table 7
Variability of V with C for multitemporal NDVI scenes.

Number of classes C 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

Cluster validity index V 0.893 0.889 0.930 0.951 0.971 0.962 0.969 0.977 0.983 0.986 0.990
8 J. Iounousse et al. / Applied Soft Computing 30 (2015) 1–13

Fig. 8. The 15 obtained NDVI profiles.

Fig. 8 illustrates the temporal evolution of the fifteen obtained NDVI
profiles which are used next to identify the main crop types.
5.3. Crop types identification using NDVI profiles
The crop identification method was designed based on field
observations. These field data were made up of some thematic
classes, including all the species encountered and their combi-
nations. Based on the temporal evolution of the fifteen obtained
NDVI profiles (Fig. 8), they can be merged to six following main
classes:
- Bare soil class (profile 4) is evident to find. This class has a constant
value of NDVI around 0.15 which corresponds to clay soil [71].
Some fluctuations of NDVI could be explained by the variation of
soil moisture and by small grown herbs due to the rainfall events.
- Tree classes are considered as NDVI profile relatively constant
over time and above 0.18 taking into account that the majority
of them are evergreen trees (olive and citrus trees). Moreover,
there are two tree classes. The first one is tree on bare soil class
(profile 5) which is clearly identified by NDVI values higher than
0.43 with limited variations in range of 0.17. The other class
(profile 6 and 7) is characterized by tree profiles having high NDVI
range variations (>0.17) labeled as tree with herbs (i.e. on annual
understory).
- Annual crops (cereals) classes are defined by NDVI values rising
above 0.18 showing significant vegetation biomass. Also these
classes are characterized by NDVI values below 0.18 at the begin-
ning and at the end of the growth phase (i.e. a period of bare
soil) which can make a distinction with evergreen tree classes.
Annual crops include mainly cereals like wheat and barley which
can be divided in early and late classes considering its tempo-
ral NDVI profiles [71]. Five profiles (profile 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12)
representing early (wheat/barley) cultivated before 15 December
and three others (profile 13, 14 and 15) corresponding to late
(wheat/barley) cultivated after 15 January with narrow growth
phase.
- Fallow land class can be defined as land with almost no vegetation
or very poorly developed wheat with low NDVI values (i.e. rainfall
wheat). This class is characterized by NDVI values less than 0.4 in
the growth phase (profile 1, 2 and 3).
Table 8 showed the land cover classes which brand each NDVI
evolution after identification.

Table 8
NDVI profiles merging and their interpretations.

NDVI profiles Interpretation of classes

7 Nov 25 Dec 26 Jan 11 Feb 31 Mar 18 May 27 Jun

0.13 0.24 0.24 0.26 0.28 0.17 0.08

0.18 0.26 0.34 0.39 0.39 0.26 0.27 Follow
0.18 0.21 0.22 0.23 0.36 0.25 0.27

0.12 0.15 0.20 0.19 0.13 0.17 0.14 Bare soil

0.43 0.47 0.48 0.55 0.60 0.49 0.49 Trees on bare soil

0.37 0.42 0.39 0.39 0.53 0.44 0.47

Trees with herbs
0.28 0.40 0.43 0.50 0.62 0.36 0.27

0.14 0.17 0.45 0.60 0.78 0.26 0.18

0.14 0.17 0.38 0.51 0.58 0.24 0.17
0.13 0.15 0.26 0.41 0.79 0.27 0.16 Early (wheat/barley)
0.16 0.19 0.27 0.35 0.60 0.28 0.27
0.15 0.39 0.52 0.55 0.49 0.24 0.19

0.13 0.15 0.28 0.34 0.36 0.17 0.08

0.12 0.15 0.14 0.23 0.61 0.27 0.16 Late (wheat/barley)
0.14 0.18 0.09 0.12 0.42 0.30 0.11
 J. Iounousse et al. / Applied Soft Computing 30 (2015) 1–13 9

Fig. 9. Land cover map obtained after classification and merging.

After merging, the obtained classes give the land cover map
illustrated in Fig. 9 with the following percentages: 17.24% of bare
soil, 12.14% of fallow, 39.47% of late (wheat/barley), 22.44% of early
(wheat/barley), 2.57% of trees on bare soil and 6.13% of trees with
herbs. The obtained results are in agreement with the previous
studies using the same data set but with other techniques of clas-
sification [71,72]. Er-Raki et al. [71] used the K-means to classify
the cereals and they found two main classes: early and late sow-
ing wheat as it has been found in this work. Simonneaux et al.
[72] used the supervised classification method based on the use
of simple phenological criteria of each crop. This method is called
decision tree [78–80] which uses the minimum, the maximum or
the range of NDVI as the phenological criteria. They obtained a gen-
eral land cover (annual crops, trees, annual crops + trees, bare soils).
By comparison with the presented classification, they did not clas-
sify the annual crops class on early and late sowing cereals and
did not separate it from the fallow land class. In Spain, Julien et al.
[9] used the Yearly Land Cover Dynamics (YLCD) approach based
on annual behavior of LST (Land Surface Temperature) and NDVI.
A time series of LANDSAT-5 images has been used to classify an
agricultural area into crop types using the maximum likelihood
classification. They obtained the main classes: cereals, irrigated and Fig. 10. Mapping of vegetation types survey in the region by sampling during
non-irrigated crops. As in this work, wheat and barley were merged 2002–2003 season.
in a single class (cereals) due to their NDVI similarity. While the irri-
gated and non-irrigated crops were separated in different classes
accuracy is computed as the proportion of true prediction results
due to strong differences in NDVI and LST annual behaviors.
(samples correctly classified) [81]. The obtained classes shown in
Table 11 are recognized with an overall accuracy of 96.56% which is
5.4. Validation of the obtained results higher in comparison with other studies [9,72]. This high accuracy

In order to check the accuracy of our approach, we compared Table 9

the obtained land use with the real one established in the study Land cover of the region by sampling in 2002–2003 season.
region. During the 2002–2003 season, data sets were collected
Classes Number of parcels Percentage
by VALERI Program [72,77] on a series of 450 sample plots dis-
tributed across the plain (Fig. 10 and Table 9). We merged the Cereals 234 52.00%
Barleys 29 6.45%
classes representing the same type of cover: Building is added
Fallow/not cultivated 59 13.11%
to bare soil class, olive trees to trees on bare soil class and bar- Alfalfa 4 0.89%
leys to cereals class in order to make a comparison with the Olive trees 5 1.11%
results of classification. To visualize the performance of the pro- Building 3 0.67%
Bare soil – fallow 77 17.11%
posed algorithm, a matching matrix is presented in Table 10. This
Trees on bare soil 11 2.44%
matrix was obtained by comparison of the proposed automatic PNN Trees with herbs 28 6.22%
classification with the validation data mentioned above. Table 11
Total 450 100%
and Fig. 11 showed the results of this comparison. The overall
10 J. Iounousse et al. / Applied Soft Computing 30 (2015) 1–13

Fig. 11. Comparison of land cover results using the proposed classification and by sampling.

Fig. 12. Land cover map obtained after classification and merging using FCM.

Table 10
Results of matching matrix using the proposed method.

Predicted classes

Cereals Fallow Trees on bare soil Trees with herbs Bare soil Alfalfa

Actual classes
Cereals 100% 0% 0% 0% 0% 0%
Fallow 5.91% 92.6% 0% 0% 1.49% 0%
Trees on bare soil 5.08% 0% 72.39% 22.53% 0% 0%
Trees with herbs 0.6% 0% 0.85% 98.55% 0% 0%
Bare soil 0.4% 2.58% 0% 0% 97.02% 0%
Alfalfa 0% 0% 0% 0% 0% 0%
 J. Iounousse et al. / Applied Soft Computing 30 (2015) 1–13 11

Fig. 13. Land cover map obtained after classification and merging using K-means.

Table 11 Table 12
Comparison of land cover results. Performance comparison between unsupervised PNN, FCM and K-means.

Classes % by % by PNN Classification Classification precision

sampling classification precision
Unsupervised FCM K-means
Cereals (wheat + barley) 58.45 61.91 100% PNN
Fallow/not cultivated 13.11 12.14 92.60%
Trees on bare soil 3.55 2.57 72.39% Classes
Trees with herbs 6.22 6.13 98.55% Cereals (wheat + barley) 100% 70.15% 74.82%
Bare soil 17.78 17.25 97.02% Fallow/not cultivated 92.6% 99.16% 95.35%
Alfalfa 0.89 – 0% Trees on bare soil 72.39% 84.51%
92.12%
Trees with herbs 98.55% 93.09%
Total 100 100 Accuracya = 96.56% Bare soil 97.02% 89.98% 95.61%

Classes Alfalfa 0% 0% 0%
a
Accuracy = (precision × % sampling). Overall accuracy 96.56% 79% 82.02%

demonstrates that the proposed approach is globally able to
retrieve automatically and accurately the existing crop types in the
region. The class of alfalfa is characterized by a NDVI profile with
frequent variation due to several cutting thus it was not recognized.
More successive scenes with no cloudiness could overcome this
miss-classification.
5.5. Performance comparison between unsupervised PNN, FCM
and K-means
In order to bring to light the performance of the proposed
method, a comparative study with other usual classification meth-
ods (FCM, K-means) is done by using the same sequence of seven
time series of NDVI images. Land cover maps obtained by using FCM
and K-means are shown in Figs. 12 and 13, respectively. The per-
formance comparisons between the three methods are displayed
in Table 12. As expected, FCM method has given a less accuracy
(79%) and a less cluster number estimation. Two classes (trees with
herbs and trees in bare soil) are merged due to their similar clusters
distribution. Regarding K-means method, it has done a reasonable
job with 82.02% of accuracy and detailed classes (good number and
type). As a conclusion, the proposed approach using PNN provides
better results with higher accuracy (96.56% of overall accuracy) in
comparison with other methods.
6. Conclusion
In this work, we have proposed an unsupervised approach based
on Probabilistic Neural Network with the implementation of cluster
validity technique using Ward’s method. This technique was firstly
validated through a series of tests including Fischer’s Iris data set,
synthetic grayscale and RGB digital images. A comparison with the
classical automatic clustering by FCM using the same concept of
cluster validation showed that the proposed algorithm was more
accurate. The strength of this approach is its capability to solve
a classification problem with unknown class number. This is the
concrete case of land use classification which proceeds with large
multidimensional data sets like multidimensional remote sensing
images. Here, effective visualization of the data set and class num-
ber prediction are difficult. In this way, the developed approach
was applied for a sequence of seven time series of NDVI remote
sensing images acquired by LANDSAT and SPOT to build land use
map. Spatial and temporal classifications were adopted. In fact,
the procedure has proven its efficiency to distinguish between dif-
ferent classes and to determine the land cover especially for the
large surfaces where the available information on soil and crops is
limited. The obtained results are compared with real land use and
showed 96.56% of overall accuracy which is higher than other usual
methods like FCM and K-means. Thus, the implementation of clus-
ter validity technique in PNN gives rise to a reliable tool for data
classifying especially for massive data like multilayer images.
12 J. Iounousse et al. / Applied Soft Computing 30 (2015) 1–13
The principal advantages of the proposed approach are: (1) it
is completely automatic with no parameter adjusting and instan-
taneous training, (2) it has high ability to perform good cluster
number estimates, (3) it provides a new point of view to use PNN
as unsupervised classifier, and (4) it is rapid and easy to implement
in soft computing for classification.
Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to the International Joint Laboratory-
TREMA (http://trema.ucam.ac.ma/) and CNES for providing us the
satellite data.
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