MIDDLE RESOLUTION REMOTE SENSING IMAGE CHANGE DETECTION BASED ON VECTOR ANALYSIS OF MIDLINE CHANGE

Abstract. The extraction and timely updating of land use /cover information is a key issue in remote sensing change detection. The change vector analysis (CVA) is a better method of change detection. However, the CVA method is the blindness of artificial choice of threshold. Moreover, the direction cosine of CVA cannot represent the unique point in change vector space and it can’t distinguish the change category effectively. In order to avoid this defect, the midline vector is added to CVA method. In this paper, we use the midline change vector analysis (MCVA) method to detect the land use /cover change in multi temporal remote sensing images. We proposed the two-step threshold method to get the optimal threshold and determine the change and the unchanged region of the difference remote sensing image. We chose Hefei city of Anhui Province as the study area, and adopted two Landsat5 TM images in 2000 and 2008 year as experiment data. We use the MCVA and two-step threshold method to achieve remote sensing change detection. In order to compare the detection accuracy between MCVA method and the traditional post classification comparison method, the paper choose the same area (178 pixels × 180 pixels) in the two images to analyse the accuracy, and compare the accuracy of MCVA method with that of the traditional post classification comparison method based on SVM. The experiment results show that the MCVA method has higher overall accuracy, lower allocation disagreement and quantity disagreement. What’s more, the overall accuracy of MCVA method can reach nearly 60%, much higher than the traditional post classification comparison method (less than 40%). And the MCVA method can effectively avoid the problem of change vector direction cosine values are not unique, and the result is much better than the traditional post classification (SVM) comparison method. It indicates that MCVA is a more effective method in land use / cover change detection for middle resolution multispectral images.