A review of methods in the field of detecting illegal open-pit mining activities

Abstract

Illegal open pit mining might be a very dangerous activity both for the environment and also for the people living in its neighbourhood. This kind of activity is connected with environmental degradation, disruption of sustainable development and lack of the most critical last stage of the mine’s “life”, i.e. land reclamation. An additional element connected with illegal exploitation is the fact of breaking the law and stealing mineral resources. Monitoring of illegal exploitation is therefore an important aspect. The presented here review was intended to investigate which methods can be used directly to detect open pit mining sites and to evaluate their effectiveness. In the reviewed works a wide variety of methods have been used, ranging from manual methods, such as photo-interpretation, to a combination of automatic methods and photo-interpretation, to fully automatic methods. Based on the analysis, it was indicated that different types of classification (supervised, unsupervised, hybrid) are the most commonly u sed. Besides, radar interferometry, image fusion techniques, or images spectral similarity are also used.