Remote Sensing & GIS based Approaches for LULC Change Detection – A Review

Abstract

Economic development and population growth have triggered rapid changes to Earth’s land cover over the last two centuries, and there is every indication that the pace of these changes will accelerate in future. Land use and land cover (LULC) change has become a central component in current strategies for managing natural resources and monitoring environmental changes. The Remote Sensing and Geographic Information System have proved to be very important in assessing and analyzing land use and land cover changes. Recent progress in remote sensing and associated digital image processing offers unprecedented opportunities to detect changes in land cover more accurately over increasingly large areas, with diminishing costs and processing time. The present reviews have assorted the detection approaches and drawn many useful conclusions. Based on the former classification methods, this article classifies change detection methods into three groups, based on pixel, feature and object level image processing.