Change Vector Analysis in Posterior Probability Space: A New Method for Land Cover Change Detection

Postclassification comparison (PCC) and change vector analysis (CVA) have been widely used for land use/cover change detection using remotely sensed data. However, PCC suffers from error cumulation stemmed from an individual image classification error, while a strict requirement of radiometric consistency in remotely sensed data is a bottleneck of CVA. This letter proposes a new method named CVA in posterior probability space (CVAPS), which analyzes the posterior probability by using CVA. The CVAPS approach was applied and validated by a case study of land cover change detection in Shunyi District, Beijing, China, based on multitemporal Landsat Thematic Mapper data. Accuracies of “change/no-change” detection and “from-to” types of change were assessed. The results show that error cumulation in PCC was reduced in CVAPS. Furthermore, the main drawbacks in CVA were also alleviated effectively by using CVAPS. Therefore, CVAPS is potentially useful in land use/cover change detection.