Tutorial: Remote Sensing Image Classification with QGIS

3.1. Load Reference Vector Data

Before we can delineate polygons with their class information, we need to load:

• The boundary of the study area
• A point dataset with groundtruth information
• A backdrop from which we can delineate the polygons

The boundary polygon and point dataset can be found in a GeoPackage that you can download here or from the main course page.

1. Open QGIS Desktop with an empty project.
2. Go to the Browser panel and locate the GeoPackage file that you have downloaded.
3. Drag the Gharbia Study Area and summer_crop_samples layers from the Browser panel to the map canvas.

Note that the ground truth points only cover a part of the Gharbia area. Also note that the project is EPSG:32636, which is UTM Zone 36 North / WGS-84.

Let's inspect the attribute table of the summer_crop_samples.

4. In the Layers panel click right on the summer_crop_samples layer and choose Open Attribute Table from the context menu.

Which land-cover classes are in the ground truth data?

In the next section we'll add a backdrop.