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Land cover change detection (LCCD) based on bitemporal remote sensing images has become a popular topic in the field of remote sensing. Despite numerous methods promoted in recent decades, an improvement on the usability and performance of these methods has remained necessary. In this paper, a novel LCCD approach based on the integration of k-means clustering and adaptive majority voting (k-means_AMV) techniques have been developed. The proposed k-means_AMV method consists of three major techniques. First, to utilize the contextual information in an adaptive manner, an adaptive region around a central pixel is constructed by detecting the spectral similarity between the central pixel and its eight neighboring pixels. Second, when the extension for the adaptive region is terminated, the k-means clustering method is applied to determine the label of each pixel within the adaptive region. Finally, an existing AMV technique is used to refine the label of the central pixel of the adaptive region. When change magnitude image (CMI) is scanned and processed in this manner, the label of each pixel in the CMI can be refined and the binary change detection map can be generated. Three image scenes related to different land cover change events are adapted to test the effectiveness and performance of the proposed k-means_AMV approach. The results show that the proposed k-means_AMV approach demonstrates better detection accuracies and visual performance than that of the several extensively used methods. INDEX TERMS Adaptive majority voting, k-means clustering, land cover change detection, remote sensing images.

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Abstract:In recent decades, land cover change detection (LCCD) using very high-spatial resolution (VHR) remote sensing images has been a major research topic. However, VHR remote sensing images usually lead to a large amount of noises in spectra, thereby reducing the reliability of the detected results. To solve this problem, this study proposes an object-based expectation maximization (OBEM) post-processing approach for enhancing raw LCCD results. OBEM defines a refinement of the labeling in a detected map to enhance its raw detection accuracies. Current mainstream change detection (preprocessing) techniques concentrate on proposing a change magnitude measurement or considering image spatial features to obtain a change detection map. The proposed OBEM approach is a new solution to enhance change detection accuracy by refining the raw result. Post-processing approaches can achieve competitive accuracies to the preprocessing methods, but in a direct and succinct manner. The proposed OBEM post-processing method synthetically considers multi-scale segmentation and expectation maximum algorithms to refine the raw change detection result. Then, the influence of the scale of segmentation on the LCCD accuracy of the proposed OBEM is investigated. Four pairs of remote sensing images, one of two pairs (aerial image with 0.5 m/pixel resolution) which depict two landslide sites on Landtau Island, Hong Kong, China, are used in the experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. In addition, the proposed approach is applied, and validated by two case studies, LCCD in Tianjin City China (SPOT-5 satellite image with 2.5 m/pixel resolution) and Mexico forest fire case (Landsat TM images with 30 m/pixel resolution), respectively. Quantitative evaluations show that the proposed OBEM post-processing approach can achieve better performance and higher accuracies than several commonly used preprocessing methods. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this type of post-processing framework is first proposed here for the field of LCCD using VHR remote sensing images.

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Abstract:Aerial image classification has become popular and has attracted extensive research efforts in recent decades. The main challenge lies in its very high spatial resolution but relatively insufficient spectral information. To this end, spatial-spectral feature extraction is a popular strategy for classification. However, parameter determination for that feature extraction is usually time-consuming and depends excessively on experience. In this paper, an automatic spatial feature extraction approach based on image raster and segmental vector data cross-analysis is proposed for the classification of very high spatial resolution (VHSR) aerial imagery. First, multi-resolution segmentation is used to generate strongly homogeneous image objects and extract corresponding vectors. Then, to automatically explore the region of a ground target, two rules, which are derived from Tobler's First Law of Geography (TFL) and a topological relationship of vector data, are integrated to constrain the extension of a region around a central object. Third, the shape and size of the extended region are described. A final classification map is achieved through a supervised classifier using shape, size, and spectral features. Experiments on three real aerial images of VHSR (0.1 to 0.32 m) are done to evaluate effectiveness and robustness of the proposed approach. Comparisons to state-of-the-art methods demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method in VHSR image classification.

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Change detection approaches based on image segmentation are often used for landslide mapping (LM) from very high-resolution (VHR) remote sensing images. However, these approaches usually have two limitations. One is that they are sensitive to thresholds used for image segmentation and require too many parameters. The other one is that the computational complexity of these approaches depends on the image size, and thus they require a long execution time for very high-resolution (VHR) remote sensing images. In this paper, an unsupervised change detection using fast fuzzy c-means clustering (CDFFCM) for LM is proposed. The proposed CDFFCM has two contributions. The first is that we employ a Gaussian pyramid-based fast fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering algorithm to obtain candidate landslide regions that have a better visual effect due to the utilization of image spatial information. The second is that we use the difference of image structure information instead of grayscale difference to obtain more accurate landslide regions. Three comparative approaches, edge-based level-set (ELSE), region-based level-set (RLSE), and change detection-based Markov random field (CDMRF), and the proposed CDFFCM are evaluated in three true landslide cases in the Lantau area of Hong Kong. The experiments show that the proposed CDFFCM is superior to three comparative approaches in terms of higher accuracy, fewer parameters, and shorter execution time.