REMOVING LAND COVER SPURIOUS CHANGE BY GEO-ECO ZONING RULE BASE

Abstract. The speed of change in land cover is growing faster with the development of social science and technology. Remote sensing has become the most effective way to monitor change information. However, remote sensing images reflect only the instantaneous state of the Earth’s surface. Spectral characteristics cannot correctly reflect the actual state, and this inability results in the limited classification accuracy of land cover products. In order to obtain high accuracy change detection results, it is necessary to identify and eliminate spurious changes.

At present, the spurious changes are generally identified by visual interpretation which not only labor and time consuming, but also easily lead to misjudgment due to the lack of identification experience of the interpreter. Therefore, it is urgent to establish a spurious change rule base to automatically identify spurious changes. In this study, the global geo-eco zoning can be used to build a rule base to identify and eliminate spurious changes.

The structure and content of the rule base are designed, the rules are represented and put into the rule library, the plugins are designed to remove spurious changes, and a rule base management system is established to identify the spurious changes using the rules in the rule base. 30m Land cover products of Laos were selected as the experimental area to verify the accuracy of the change patches after eliminating spurious changes. Results show that the accuracy of change detection is improved by using the rule base of geo-eco zoning to identify spurious changes.