Land use / land cover change detection: an object oriented approach, Münster, Germany

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Geospatial TechnologiesLand use / land cover (LULC) change detection based on remote sensing (RS) data has been established as an indispensible tool for providing suitable and wide-ranging information to various decision support systems for natural resource management and sustainable development. LULC change is one of the major influencing factors for landscape changes. There are many change detection techniques developed over decades, in practice, it is still difficult to develop a suitable change detection method especially in case of urban and urban fringe areas where several impacts of complex factors are found including rapid changes from rural land uses to residential, commercial, industrial and recreational uses. Although these changes can be monitored using several techniques of RS application, adopting a suitable technique to represent the changes accurately is a challenging task. There are a number of challenges in RS application for analysis of LULC change detection. This study applies objectoriented (OO) method for mapping LULC and performing change detection analysis using post-classification technique.(...