Soft Computing Techniques for Land Use and Land Cover Monitoring with Multispectral Remote Sensing Images: A Review

Abstract

Multispectral remote sensing images are the primary source in the land use and land cover (LULC) monitoring. This is achieved by LULC classification and LULC change detection. The change detection in LULC includes the detection of water bodies, forest fire, forest degradation, agriculture areas monitoring, etc. Various change detection and LULC classification methods have their own advantages and disadvantages, and no single method is optimal and finds applicability for all cases. This paper summarizes and analyses the various soft computing and feature extraction techniques used for LULC classification and change detection. Based on the average error rate, performances of the different soft computing techniques are evaluated. The broad usage of multispectral remote sensing images, object-based change detection, neural networks and various levels of image fusion methods offer more potential in LULC monitoring.