Spatio-Temporal Deforestation Measurement Using Automatic Clustering

Deforestation is one of the crucial issues in Indonesia. In 2012, deforestation rate in Indonesia reached 0.84 million hectares, exceeding Brazil. According to the 2009 Guinness World Records, Indonesia's deforestation rate was 1.8 million hectares per year between 2000 and 2005. An interesting view is the fact that Indonesia government denied the deforestation rate in those years and said that the rate was only 1.08 million hectares per year in 2000 and 2005. The different problem is on the technique how to deal with the deforestation rate. In this paper, we proposed a new approach for automatically identifying the deforestation area and measuring the deforestation rate. This approach involves differential image processing for detecting Spatio-temporal nature changes of deforestation. It consists series of important features extracted from multiband satellite images which are considered as the dataset of the research. These data are proceeded through the following stages: (1) Automatic clustering for multiband satellite images, (2) Reinforcement Programming to optimize K-Means clustering, (3) Automatic interpretation for deforestation areas, and (4) Deforestation measurement adjusting with elevation of the satellite. For experimental study, we applied our proposed approach to analyze and measure the deforestation in Mendawai, South Borneo. We utilized Landsat 7 to obtain the multiband images for that area from the year 2001 to 2013. Our proposed approach is able to identify the deforestation area and measure the rate. The experiment with our proposed approach made a temporal measurement for the area and showed the increasing deforestation size of the area 1.80 hectares during those years