Parcel-Based Change Detection in Land-Use Maps by Adopting the Holistic Feature

Updating the existing land-use maps with remote sensing imagery has become a common method to produce the latest land-use database. An important step is to extract the changed information. In this paper, we propose a novel method to extract the changed parcels in land-use maps by using the holistic feature called “Spatial Envelope,” which encodes each parcel without segmenting it into homogeneous objects or small regions. The holistic feature is based on the energy spectrum of the windowed Fourier transform (WFT) of each land-use parcel, which is ideal for scene categorization. Unlike the pixel-based change detection using the difference image (DI) leading to speckled results or object-based method which requires a complicated process to segment the land-use parcel into homogeneous land-cover objects, our parcel-based change detection treats each land-use parcel as an entirety by calculating the holistic feature for the former and latter parcels. Then, the distance between the corresponding former and latter parcels is compared against a threshold to select the changed parcels. Experiments have demonstrated that our procedure can extract the changed parcels with the overall accuracy of more than 92%. The performance of our procedure is reliable not only on the high-resolution (HR) images of the same sensor, but also on the images acquired by different sensors with the same or approximate spatial resolution. Comparative experiments have also proved that the holistic feature is better than conventional spectral and textural features in parcel-based change detection.