An overview on Change Detection and a Case Study Using Multi-temporal Satellite Imagery

Satellite imagery based change detection plays an important role in analyzing the after effects of natural disasters, detecting the changes in city limits due to rapid urbanization, updating the map database, monitoring the factors impacting agriculture, etc., The remote sensors mounted on satellites or aircrafts absorb the light reflected by the earth’s surface. The output of these sensors will be a digital image which represents the scene being perceived. In order to extract the useful information from these images, various image processing techniques need to be employed. In this paper, a detailed outline of the steps and various techniques used for detecting the changes in multi temporal remote sensing images is discussed and a case study is done by taking multi-temporal Landsat-8 images covering Hyderabad city. Image differencing method is applied in order to find the changes in the Hyderabad city limits over 2013December and 2017 December time periods.