A rapidly increasing demand for accurate and updated geo-spatial information requires advanced techniques for extracting and providing relevant information. The presented work was carried out in a 3654 km² sized area in the region of Stuttgart/Germany, characterized by high dynamic growth and steady economic development. The project Biotope Information and Management System (BIMS) provides and monitors aggregated spatial units relevant for regional planning tasks. We discuss experiences from the first phase of the project, in which we developed an adaptive per-parcel approach for delineating elementary units using SPOT-5 MS data (5 m GSD). The target geometry was pre-defined by digital cadastre data from 2005, but not all existing boundaries were retained: some were dismissed, others introduced. We followed a threefold strategy: (1) a parcel with internal homogeneity remains the same; (2) neighboring parcels with similar spectral behavior are merged; (3) a single, heterogeneous parcel is split and new boundaries are generated. By this, the initial number of units dropped to one fourth. The majority of the units were merged due to trans-boundary homogeneity, one fourth was subdivided. Assets of this approach are its cost-efficiency, the high matching degree of the produced geometry and the transferability to similar cases because of the standardized character of the data sets involved.

Date Published: 12 November 2007
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 6749, Remote Sensing for Environmental Monitoring, GIS Applications, and Geology VII, 674912 (12 November 2007); doi: 10.1117/12.739034

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 6749:
Remote Sensing for Environmental Monitoring, GIS Applications, and Geology VII
Manfred Ehlers; Ulrich Michel, Editor(s)