Entity-based image analysis: A new strategy to map rural settlements from Landsat images

Accurate and timely mapping of rural settlements using medium-resolution satellite imagery, such as Landsat data, is crucial for evaluating rural infrastructure, estimating ecological service values, assessing the quality of life for rural populations, and promoting sustainable rural development. Current mapping techniques, including pixel-based and object-based classifications, primarily focus on identifying artificial surfaces, often failing to capture the complete spatial footprint of rural settlements. These settlements consist of diverse land cover elements, such as houses, roads, agricultural buildings, ponds, parks, and woodlands, which together form entities with distinct local characteristics. To address this limitation, we introduce a novel classification strategy: Entity-Based Image Analysis (EBIA). Inspired by cognitive principles of human visual perception, EBIA groups related land cover elements and differentiates settlements from their background. The key innovation of EBIA lies in its ability to incorporate semantic features within rural settlements, transforming pixel-level land cover classification results (Phase 1) into entity-level settlement mapping results (Phase 2). Our results demonstrate that EBIA effectively maps the comprehensive footprint of rural settlement entities, achieving F1 scores ranging from 0.79 to 0.88 across five globally selected experimental areas. Furthermore, EBIA can be utilized to monitor changes in rural settlements using long-term Landsat imagery. As a new classification strategy, EBIA holds potential for mapping other geographic entities. • Rural settlements are geographic entities composed of diverse land covers. • A novel entity-based image analysis (EBIA) strategy was inspired by human perception. • EBIA incorporates semantic features of rural settlements from satellite images. • EBIA can map the complete footprint of rural settlements from Landsat images. • EBIA can be applied to monitor long-term rural settlement changes.