Physical and Environmental Geography Commons^™

Rapid Land Cover Map Updates Using Change Detection And Robust Random Forest Classifiersrapid Land Cover Map Updates Using Change Detection And Robust Random Forest Classifiers, Konrad J. Wassels, Frans Van Den Bergh, David P. Roy, Brian P. Salmon, Karen C. Steenkemp, Bryan Macalister, Derick Swanepoel, Debbie Jewitt

GSCE Faculty Publications

The paper evaluated the Landsat Automated Land Cover Update Mapping (LALCUM) system designed to rapidly update a land cover map to a desired nominal year using a pre-existing reference land cover map. The system uses the Iteratively Reweighted Multivariate Alteration Detection (IRMAD) to identify areas of change and no change. The system then automatically generates large amounts of training samples (n > 1 million) in the no-change areas as input to an optimized Random Forest classifier. Experiments were conducted in the KwaZulu-Natal Province of South Africa using a reference land cover map from 2008, a change mask between 2008 and …