Continuous change detection and classification of land cover using all available Landsat data

2014 ◽  
Vol 144 ◽  
pp. 152-171 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhe Zhu ◽  
Curtis E. Woodcock
2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (11) ◽  
pp. 1775 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhihui Wang ◽  
Wenyi Yao ◽  
Qiuhong Tang ◽  
Liangyun Liu ◽  
Peiqing Xiao ◽  
...  

Accurate identification of the spatiotemporal distribution of forest/grassland and cropland is necessary for studying hydro-ecological effects of vegetation change in the Loess Plateau, China. Currently, the accuracy of change detection of land cover using Landsat data in the loess hill and gully areas is seriously affected by insufficient temporal information from observations and irregular fluctuations in vegetation greenness caused by precipitation and human activities. In this study, we propose a method for continuous change detection for two types of land cover, mosaic forest/grassland and cropland, using all available Landsat data. The period with vegetation coverage is firstly identified using normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) time series. The intra-annual NDVI time series is then developed at a 1-day resolution based on linear interpolation and S-G filtering using all available NDVI data during the period when vegetation types are stable. Vegetation type change is initially detected by comparing the NDVI of intra-annual composites and the newly observed NDVI. Finally, the time of change and classification for vegetation types are determined using decision tree rules developed using a combination of inter-annual and intra-annual NDVI temporal metrics. Validation results showed that the change detection was accurate, with an overall accuracy of 88.9% ± 1.0%, and a kappa coefficient of 0.86, and the time of change was successfully retrieved, with 85.2% of the change pixels attributed to within a 2-year deviation. Consequently, the accuracy of change detection was improved by reducing temporal false detection and enhancing spatial classification accuracy.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (18) ◽  
pp. 3091
Author(s):  
Shuai Xie ◽  
Liangyun Liu ◽  
Jiangning Yang

Percentile features derived from Landsat time-series data are widely adopted in land-cover classification. However, the temporal distribution of Landsat valid observations is highly uneven across different pixels due to the gaps resulting from clouds, cloud shadows, snow, and the scan line corrector (SLC)-off problem. In addition, when applying percentile features, land-cover change in time-series data is usually not considered. In this paper, an improved percentile called the time-series model (TSM)-adjusted percentile is proposed for land-cover classification based on Landsat data. The Landsat data were first modeled using three different time-series models, and the land-cover changes were continuously monitored using the continuous change detection (CCD) algorithm. The TSM-adjusted percentiles for stable pixels were then derived from the synthetic time-series data without gaps. Finally, the TSM-adjusted percentiles were used for generating supervised random forest classifications. The proposed methods were implemented on Landsat time-series data of three study areas. The classification results were compared with those obtained using the original percentiles derived from the original time-series data with gaps. The results show that the land-cover classifications obtained using the proposed TSM-adjusted percentiles have significantly higher overall accuracies than those obtained using the original percentiles. The proposed method was more effective for forest types with obvious phenological characteristics and with fewer valid observations. In addition, it was also robust to the training data sampling strategy. Overall, the methods proposed in this work can provide accurate characterization of land cover and improve the overall classification accuracy based on such metrics. The findings are promising for percentile-based land cover classification using Landsat time series data, especially in the areas with frequent cloud coverage.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (23) ◽  
pp. 2833 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katie Awty-Carroll ◽  
Pete Bunting ◽  
Andy Hardy ◽  
Gemma Bell

Mangrove forests play a global role in providing ecosystem goods and services in addition to acting as carbon sinks, and are particularly vulnerable to climate change effects such as rising sea levels and increased salinity. For this reason, accurate long-term monitoring of mangrove ecosystems is vital. However, these ecosystems are extremely dynamic and data frequency is often reduced by cloud cover. The Continuous Change Detection and Classification (CCDC) method has the potential to overcome this by utilising every available observation on a per-pixel basis to build stable season-trend models of the underlying phenology. These models can then be used for land cover classification and to determine greening and browning trends. To demonstrate the utility of this approach, CCDC was applied to a 30-year time series of Landsat data covering an area of mangrove forest known as the Sundarbans. Spanning the delta formed by the confluence of the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna river systems, the Sundarbans is the largest contiguous mangrove forest in the world. CCDC achieved an overall classification accuracy of 94.5% with a 99% confidence of being between 94.2% and 94.8%. Results showed that while mangrove extent in the Sundarbans has remained stable, around 25% of the area experienced an overall negative trend, probably due to the effect of die-back on Heritiera fomes. In addition, dates and magnitudes of change derived from CCDC were used to investigate damage and recovery from a major cyclone; 11% of the Sundarbans was found to have been affected by Cyclone Sidr in 2007, 47.6% of which had not recovered by mid-2018. The results indicate that while the Sundarbans forest is resilient to cyclone events, the long-term degrading effects of climate change could reduce this resilience to critical levels. The proposed methodology, while computationally expensive, also offers means by which the full Landsat archive can be analyzed and interpreted and should be considered for global application to mangrove monitoring.


2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (10) ◽  
pp. 1664 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mi Song ◽  
Yanfei Zhong ◽  
Ailong Ma

Change detection (CD) of natural land cover is important for environmental protection and to maintain an ecological balance. The Landsat series of satellites provide continuous observation of the Earth’s surface and is sensitive to reflection of water, soil and vegetation. It offers fine spatial resolutions (15–80 m) and short revisit times (16–18 days). Therefore, Landsat imagery is suitable for monitoring natural land cover changes. Clustering-based CD methods using evolutionary algorithms (EAs) can be applied to Landsat images to obtain optimal changed and unchanged clustering centers (clusters) with minimum clustering index. However, they directly analyze difference image (DI), which finds itself subject to interference by Gaussian noise and local brightness distortion in Landsat data, resulting in false alarms in detection results. In order to reduce image interferences and improve CD accuracy, we proposed an unsupervised CD method based on multi-feature clustering using the differential evolution algorithm (M-DECD) for Landsat Imagery. First, according to characteristics of Landsat data, a multi-feature space is constructed with three elements: Wiener de-noising, detail enhancement, and structural similarity. Then, a CD method based on differential evolution (DE) algorithm and fuzzy clustering is proposed to obtain global optimal clusters in the multi-feature space, and generate a binary change map (CM). In addition, the control parameters of the DE algorithm are adjusted to improve the robustness of M-DECD. The experimental results obtained with four Landsat datasets confirm the effectiveness of M-DECD. Compared with the results of conventional methods and the current state-of-the-art methods based on evolutionary clustering, the detection accuracies of the M-DECD on the Mexico dataset and the Sardinia dataset are very close to the best results. The accuracies of the M-DECD in the Alaska dataset and the large Canada dataset increased by about 3.3% and 11.9%, respectively. This indicates that multiple features are suitable for Landsat images and the DE algorithm is effective in searching for an optimal CD result.


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