Abstract
Abstract. The research and development project named Landscape Change Detection Service (German abbreviation: LaVerDi) was initiated by the German Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy (BKG). Within the scope of the project a monitoring service for landscape changes was developed and implemented using free Copernicus satellite data for an automated derivation of potential land cover change. This change indication is meant to be used to update or continue BKG in-house products, such as the Digital Land Cover Model Germany (LBM-DE), in a comprehensive and uniform quality. The results can be further used for numerous applications or as change information for administration and planning, and for the compilation of spatial statistics. It satisfies the users' need for a national service for open data on land cover changes and thus represents the first automatic and verified national satellite product for land cover changes in Germany. As input data the service uses pre-processed Sentinel-2 data from the European Copernicus satellite program, as well as an image segmentation approach to extract change objects. Using an improved cloud mask algorithm, Sentinel-2 tiles with up to maximum cloud coverage of 60% can be used for analysis. The service (data processing, change detection, visualisation) runs on the German “Copernicus Data and Utilization Platform” (CODE-DE). As of December 2020, the INSPIRE-compliant LaVerDi web service is operational. The thematic accuracy of the generated change layers is above the given requirements (minimum of 80%), considering the 95% confidence interval for all relevant land cover classes in certain test areas. The transferability of the methodology has been successfully shown by a prototypic nationwide demonstrator in early 2020 and is therefore expected to reliably detect both long-term and seasonal changes.
Highlights
Determining changes of the Earth's surface is a common application of satellite-based Earth observation (Townshend et al 1991)
The final goal of the project was the development of a performant web application for a regular and automatic cloud-based provision of change indications for Germany
There is a sufficiently high probability that enough cloudfree observations are available for a reliable change detection
Summary
Determining changes of the Earth's surface is a common application of satellite-based Earth observation (Townshend et al 1991). First change analysis methods were already presented in the 1980s (Singh 1989). Since a variety of increasingly improved methods and algorithms have been developed. The availability of potentially suitable satellite image data has vastly increased. In addition to the number of available sensors with high spatial resolution (e.g. Landsat, SPOT, Sentinel), a large portion of this data is available free of charge, enabling large-scale evaluation and application in various disciplines. In order to be able to process these large amounts of data (cost-) efficiently, a high degree of automation is necessary
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callMore From: ISPRS Annals of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences
Disclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
