Use of Remote Sensing Techniques for Robust Digital Change Detection of Land: A Review

Vijay      S. Bhagat

Abstract

Space technology is an efficient tool to bridge the gap between knowledge demand and availability for sustainable land management (SLM). Changes in state of land object/phenomenon are the indicators of changes in land qualities, functions and use sustainability. Change detection (CD) using satellite data is the measurement of difference between reflected/backscattered radiance from land object/phenomenon recorded in reference scene and target scene at different time. Several CD studies and patents have reported complimentary results and successful applications of remotely sensed data at different resolution, techniques and approaches. However, these results are susceptible to data quality, technical efficiency and suitability of techniques and methods selected for data processing. Therefore, reported success studies are very site and situation specific and insufficient to reach at global conclusions. The study concludes: 1) no existing approaches are optimal and applicable to all cases, 2) new approaches and techniques be adopted for precise CD and 3) they should thoroughly be tested in different environmental conditions for confident global applicability. The field is still an active, challenging and interesting area of research for SLM.

Keywords: Change detection, classification, co-registration, comparison, differencing, fusion, indices, land, radiometric normalization, satellite data