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THE RESEARCH OF THE DYNAMIC MONITORING TECHNIQUE FOR LAND USE 
BASED ON REMOTE SENSING IMAGERY 
Shao Yong-she*, Zhang Shao-ming , Dou Jian-fang , Jia Sheng-ju 
Department of Surveying and Geo-informatics of Tongji University, Shanghai, China,200092 
Commission WGs, WG VII/5 
KEY WORDS: Remote Sensing Imagery, Dynamic Monitoring, Change Detection, Land Use, Change Polygon 
ABSTRACT: 
For the past few years, the dynamic monitoring technique for land use based on high resolution remote sensing imagery is at the 
stage of key techniques research and system development in China. The paper regards the system of the dynamic monitoring for 
land use of the GuangDong province as an example, and expounds detailedly the key techniques and the process obtaining the 
change polygon. In the paper, a brief introduction about the constituent of the dynamic monitoring system is firstly given. Then, the 
area change detection techniques, classification methods, the alterative area and attributes acquisition are discussed in detail. Lastly, 
the paper describes the operation flowline and primary function, and analyzes the application perspective of the system and the 
problems that will be improved in the future. 
1. INTRODUCTION 
The research of the change monitoring using remote sensing 
imagery began in the 1960s later. Dynamic change monitoring 
can be used to agriculture, forestry, water conservancy, and 
land resources surveying. For the time being, the remote 
sensing change monitoring technology is mostly used in land 
cover investigation, land use surveying, forest cover 
investigation, water area surveying and so on in China. Since 
2000, China has carried out the census in land use, and 
established the National Land Use Database (Shen Xiao-le et al, 
2007). Nevertheless, with the sustaining and rapid growth of 
national economy, as well as the less and less arable land, 
dynamic monitoring and reasonable planning of the land use 
play a very important role in ensuring the sustaining and 
healthy development of the national economy. 
In China, the monitoring of land use information generally 
experienced the following three stages. The first stage is the 
initial artificial investigation stage, which the change 
information is entirely completed by the artificial investigation, 
and is in low efficiency and a long life cycle; the second is 
dynamic monitoring stage and regards the aerial photos as 
information sources, which mainly monitors the change by 
means of visual interpretation and image processing, and is very 
expensive and in a longer cycle; the third stage regards remote 
sensing satellite imagery as the main data sources, and 
combines the dynamic monitoring technology of remote sensing 
imagery so as to implement dynamic monitoring of land use, 
which is being in the stage of key technologies research and 
application at present(Di Feng-ping et al, 2008). 
In this paper, we take the dynamic monitoring system of land 
use in Guangdong for an example, expound the key 
technologies and processes of the subsystem acquiring change 
polygon in detail, and introduce the operation flowline and the 
primary functions of the system. 
2. THE SYSTEM OF LAND USE CHANGE PLOYGON 
DETECTION 
Change monitoring of land use mainly determines the change 
orientation, distribution, extent, categories and area size for 
land use and land cover at a certain period of time. The change 
detection, classification, regional extraction and edge tracking 
technology, which fit to the remote sensing imagery, are used to 
acquire change polygon of land use based on the constitution of 
changing information and characteristics. After the attributes of 
change polygon are ascertained, the land-use database will be 
updated. Therefore, the polygon acquisition becomes one of the 
key technologies in the dynamic monitoring of land use. The 
major component of acquiring change polygon of land use 
includes change detection, polygon extraction, classification, 
attribute information acquisition and edition, which is shown in 
Figure 1. 
3. PLOYGON DETECTION AND ATTRIBUTE 
INFORMATION ACQUISITION 
3.1 Change Polygon Detection 
Change polygon detection is one of the key technologies for 
dynamic monitoring of land use. A variety of methods can 
improve the reliability of change detection of remote sensing 
imagery (Zhang Ji-xian et al, 2005). Therefore, the module of 
the change detection system mainly includes image differential 
method, principal component analysis (PCA) and correlation 
analysis (CA) (Gatsis, I. et al, 2006). Image differential method 
is a kind of the simple methods for change detection, but the 
results depend on the image quality. 
PCA transforms a set of correlated variables into a group of 
independent and orthogonal variables, which is the linear 
combination of input variables so as to eliminate redundancy 
* Corresponding author. Tel.: 86-21-65981710. E-mail address: Shaoysh@sina.com