Accuracy assessment for remote sensing classification is commonly based on using an error matrix, or confusion table, which needs reference, or ‘ground truthing’, data to support. When undertaking change detection using numerous multi-temporal images, it is often difficult to make the accuracy assessment by the ‘traditional’ method, which typically requires simultaneous collection of reference ...

In last decades the spreading of new buildings, road infrastructures and a scattered proliferation of houses in zones outside urban areas, produced countryside urbanization with no rules, consuming soils and impoverishing the landscape. Such a phenomenon generated a huge environmental impact, diseconomies and a decrease in life quality. Although urban growth is perceived as necessary for a sust...

Urban warming is sensitive to the nature (thermal properties, including albedo, water content, heat capacity and thermal conductivity) and the placement (surface geometry or urban topography) of urban surface. In this research, the pattern and variation of urban surface temperature is regarded as one kind of landscape, urban thermal landscape, which is assumed as the presentation of local surfa...

This paper describes the methods and results of classifications of multi-temporal Landsat TM/ETM+ data of the seven-county Twin Cities Metropolitan Area of Minnesota for 1986, 1991 and 1998. The overall classification accuracies were 95% for the three years, and the change detection accuracy was 88-90%. The classifications showed that the amount of urban or developed land increased from 25.8% t...

An object-based method is proposed in this paper for change detection in urban areas with multi-sensor multispectral (MS) images. The co-registered bi-temporal images are resampled to match each other. By mapping the segmentation of one image to the other, a change map is generated by characterizing the change probability of image objects based on the proposed change feature analysis. The map i...

Patterns of urban development across the United States are changing natural landscapes and their dynamics. Although scholars in landscape ecology are increasingly studying the relationship between urban development and ecological conditions, few have directly addressed the question of how patterns of urban development affect landscape dynamics. In this paper we first propose that landscape patt...