Object-oriented Urban Dynamic Monitoring——A Case Study of Haidian District of Beijing

It is crucial to conduct the land use/cover research to obtain the global change information.Urban area is one of the most sensitive areas in land use/cover change.Therefore land use/cover change in urban areas is very im-portant in global change.It is vital to incorporate the information of urban land use/cover change into the process of decision-making about urban area development.In this paper,a new urban change detection approach,urban dynamic monitoring based on objects,is introduced.This approach includes four steps:1)producing multi-scale objects from multi-temporal remotely sensed images with spectrum,texture and context information;2)extracting possible changed objects adopting object-oriented classification;3)obtaining shared objects as the basic units for urban change detection;4)determining the threshold to segment the changed objects from the possible changed objects using Otsu method.In this paper,the object-based approach was applied to detecting the urban expansion in Haidian District,Beijing,China with two Landsat Thematic Mapper(TM)data in 1997 and 2004.The results indicated that the overall accuracy was about 84.83%,and Kappa about 0.785.Compared with other conventional approaches,the object-based approach was advantageous in reducing the error accumulation of image classification of each datum and in independence to the radiometric correction and image registration accuracy.

Understanding spatial structures and organizational patterns of city networks in China: A highway passenger flow perspective

The use of multi-perspective and multi-scalar city networks has gradually developed into a range of critical approaches to understand spatial interactions and linkages. In particular, road linkages represent key characteristics of spatial dependence and distance decay, and are of great significance in depicting spatial relationships at the regional scale. Therefore, based on highway passenger flow data between prefecture-level administrative units, this paper attempted to identify the functional structures and regional impacts of city networks in China, and to further explore the spatial organization patterns of the existing functional regions, aiming to deepen our understanding of city network structures and to provide new cognitive perspectives for ongoing research. The research results lead to four key conclusions. First, city networks that are based on highway flows exhibit strong spatial dependence and hierarchical characteristics, to a large extent spatially coupled with the distributions of major megaregions in China. These phenomena are a reflection of spatial relationships at regional scales as well as core-periphery structure. Second, 19 communities that belong to an important type of spatial configuration are identified through community detection algorithm, and we suggest they are correspondingly urban economic regions within urban China. Their spatial metaphors include the administrative region economy, spatial spillover effects of megaregions, and core-periphery structure. Third, each community possesses a specific city network system and exhibits strong spatial dependence and various spatial organization patterns. Regional patterns have emerged as the result of multi-level, dynamic, and networked characteristics. Fourth, adopting a morphology-based perspective, the regional city network systems can be basically divided into monocentric, dual-nuclei, polycentric, and low-level equilibration spatial structures, while most are developing monocentrically.