Query and retrieval of land cover patterns

Ability to explore and mine land use/land cover (LULC) maps having high resolution and large spatial extent could significantly enhance the value of such datasets. In this paper we present a method for retrieval of alike scenes from large LULC datasets. Alikeness between the two scenes is defined as similarity between their spatial patterns of class labels. Our method works on the principle of query-by-example; the inputs are the LULC map and a reference scene and the output is a similarity map indicating a degree of alikeness between a given location on the map and the reference scene. The similarity measure is described and its applicability to the National Land Cover Dataset 2006 (NLCD2006) is discussed.