Updating land-cover maps by using texture information from very high-resolution space-borne imagery

The process of updating existing land-cover databases is an issue of great concern and is needed to maintain the value of existing and expensive infor mation, Often, this problem is one of integrating appropriately multitempor al data sets that are completely different in nature, such as the updating of old vector data with new image data. In this paper, a methodology is proposed for the updating of land-cover dat abases of rural areas by using very high-resolution panchromatic space-born e imagery. The task is to identify the extension of urban and industrial ar eas, At a given scale, the homogeneity of texture derived from newly acquir ed imagery is measured within the polygons to update by means of a knowledg e-based segmentation approach, In a successive step, the new region boundar ies are compared with the existing polygons, This basically transforms the change-detection problem into one of image segmentation, Experimental results for the updating of land-cover maps by IRS-1C panchrom atic imagery indicate the usefulness of the direction that is adopted.