Land Cover Change Analysis Using Change Detection Methods

Land cover change detection analysis by remote sensing currently is used for monitoring and accounting. The existing diversity of change detection methods and the absence of the conventional way of change detection methods choice in each case do not allow unsupervised analysis of large amounts of data. A proposed multi-stage approach, involves the use of multiple change detection methods and thresholding functions, as well as a way to assess the scale of changes. This approach allows to select data and deserves expert review from a large amount of incoming data. On the example of Portugal’s land cover change analysis project, the paper shows result fragments of change detection which were obtained by different methods and threshold functions. The assessment of changes scale was concluded to see whether further analysis is necessary for landscape fragments.