Land Cover Feature Extraction from Satellite Imagery

Question

I'm interested in a low-cost or open source solution for creating land cover GIS layers that utilize both spectral and textural extraction algorithms. I have used PCI Geomatica, ENVI, and Feature Analyst VLS in the past; however these solutions are a bit beyond my price range, any software recommendations?

Answer 1

You can use GRASS GIS for this which supports texture extraction and image classification based on a radiometric/segmentation approach. For an idea, check this conference abstract, a planned talk at the Geoinformatics FCE CTU 2011.

See also: http://grass.osgeo.org/wiki/Image_processing and http://grass.osgeo.org/wiki/Image_classification for an overview.