Unsupervised Short-term Monitoring of Human-Induced Land Cover Change Using Repeat-Pass RADARSAT-2 Polarimetric SAR Images

Department: Urban Planning and Design
Research Centre: Centre of Urban Studies and Urban Planning
Active Dates: September 2014 - August 2016

Principal Investigator: Anthony G.O. YEH (PI), Zhixin QI (Co-I)
Funding body: GRF

Abstract

Timely detection of construction land expansion is essential for urban planning and management. Synthetic aperture radar (SAR), which is not affected by clouds, is therefore a promising tool for extracting timely information on land development for construction. However, seasonal growth of crops results in land cover changes that can be mistakenly interpreted as changes induced by land development, and creates considerable difficulties for the detection of construction land expansion using two Polarimetric SAR (PolSAR) images. A comparison is made between monthly construction land expansion detection with two successive images, that with three successive images, and that with the crop phenology-based approach.

Objectives

This study proposes a crop phenology-based approach that uses polarimetric SAR imagery to detect construction land expansion every month and reduce the disturbance from seasonal crop growth.