Characterizing Landscape Spatial Heterogeneity in Multisensor Images with Variogram Models

Most evaluation of the consistency of multisensor images have focused on Normalized Difference Vegetation Index （NDVI） products for natural landscapes, often neglecting less vegetated urban landscapes. This gap has been filled through quantifying and evaluating spatial heterogeneity of urban and natural landscapes from QuickBird, Satellite pour l＇observation de la Terre （SPOT）, Ad- vanced Spacebome Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer （ASTER） and Landsat Thematic Mapper （TM） images with variogram analysis. Instead of a logarithmic relationship with pixel size observed in the corresponding aggregated images, the spatial variability decayed and the spatial structures decomposed more slowly and complexly with spatial resolution for real multisensor im- ages. As the spatial resolution increased, the proportion of spatial variability of the smaller spatial structure decreased quickly and only a larger spatial structure was observed at very coarse scales. Compared with visible band, greater spatial variability was observed in near infrared band for both densely and less densely vegetated landscapes. The influence of image size on spatial heterogeneity was highly dependent on whether the empirical sernivariogram reached its sill within the original image size. When the empirical semivariogram did not reach its sill at the original observation scale, spatial variability and mean characteristic length scale would increase with image size; otherwise they might decrease. This study could provide new insights into the knowledge of spatial heterogeneity in real multisen- sor images with consideration of their nominal spatial resolution, image size and spectral bands.

Urban Land Use Change Detection Using Multisensor Satellite Images

Due to inappropriate planning and management, accelerated urban growth and tremendous loss in land, especially cropland, have become a great challenge for sustainable urban development in China, especially in developed urban area in the coastal regions; therefore, there is an urgent need to effectively detect and monitor the land use changes and provide accurate and timely information for planning and management. In this study a method combining principal component analysis (PCA) of multisensor satellite images from SPOT (systeme pour l'observation de la terre or earth observation satellite)-5 multispectral (XS) and Landsat-7 enhanced thematic mapper (ETM) panchromatic (PAN) data, and supervised classification was used to detect and analyze the dynamics of land use changes in the city proper of Hangzhou. The overall accuracy of the land use change detection was 90.67% and Kappa index was 0.89. The results indicated that there was a considerable land use change (10.03% of the total area) in the study area from 2001 to 2003, with three major types of land use conversions: from cropland into built-up land, construction site, and water area (fish pond). Changes from orchard land into built-up land were also detected. The method described in this study is feasible and useful for detecting rapid land use change in the urban area.

A NOVEL REGION FEATURE USED IN MULTISENSOR IMAGE FUSION

A new region feature which emphasized the salience of target region and its neighbors is proposed. In region segmentation-based multisensor image fusion scheme, the presented feature can be extracted from each segmented region to determine the fusion weight. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed feature has extensive application scope and it provides much more information for each region. It can not only be used in image fusion but also be used in other image processing applications.