Hard and soft classification techniques are the conventional methods of image classification for satellite data, but they have their own advantages and drawbacks. In order to obtain accurate classification results, we took advantages of both traditional hard classification methods (HCM) and soft classification models (SCM), and developed a new method called the hard and soft classification model (HSCM) based on adaptive threshold calculation. The authors tested the new method in land cover mapping applications. According to the results of confusion matrix, the overall accuracy of HCM, SCM, and HSCM is 71.06%, 67.86%, and 71.10%, respectively. And the kappa coefficient is 60.03%, 56.12%, and 60.07%, respectively. Therefore, the HSCM is better than HCM and SCM. Experimental results proved that the new method can obviously improve the land cover and land use classification accuracy.