IAPRS & SIS, Vol.34, Part 7, “Resource and Environmental Monitoring”, Hyderabad, India, 2002 
DEVELOPMENT OF A QUERY SHELL FOR AUTOMATIC 
GENERATION OF LAND USE / LAND COVER MAPS FOR 
CHANGE DETECTION ANALYSIS AND MONITORING 
M.C.Gupta, Dharmendra Shah and Shailesh Nayak* 
Marine and Water Resources Group 
Space Applications Centre (ISRO), Ahmedabad 
e-mail : guptamaheshc @rediffmail.com 
Commission VII 
KEY WORDS : Query shell, Change Detection Maps, Classification, Raster data, Vector data 
ABSTRACT : 
Monitoring land use/ land cover of an area is one of the most important tasks for its sustainable development. Information about the 
exact location of areas undergoing changes over a period, their quantitative aerial extent, from which category to what category they 
are changing, will provide the necessary inputs to the decision makers/ planners to find the causes of changes and hence the remedial 
actions to be taken for its optimal development. This paper presents a customized query shell developed around GIS to provide all 
these information using remote sensing data and GIS which can serve an important customized tool for natural resource monitoring, 
management, leading to a proper and sustainable development of an area. This query shell facilitates automatic map generation by 
integrating multi-temporal remote sensing raster data obtained from different satellites (having different spectral and spatial 
characteristics) and / or vector database. 
The query shell, in general, can be used for any application involving multi-temporal raster and/ or vector data sets without going 
into the intricacies of the analysis techniques of GIS and the nature of satellite data such as spectral band width or the spatial 
resolutions of different data sets. The earlier software (Gupta et. al., 2001) was developed for image integration with vector data sets 
in GIS and was having in-built capabilities of performing normalization of multi-temporal raster and vector data after their 
registration and selection of area of interest) with automatic legend and scale generation. It provided multi-dates thematic maps on 
the same scale with their areas. The present query shell takes raster-raster or vector-vector data sets and provides two maps, i) 
showing areas which have not changed (constant area map) and ii) showing areas which have changed (changed area map). It 
automatically generates the legend, listing, from what category to which category, the areas are changed, along with its quantitative 
aerial extent. In the present study, query shell has been used to generate the map for land uses such as vital habitats (corals, 
mangroves), agriculture, forest, sandy-beach etc. using LISS-III data of January 18, 1996 and March 9, 2000 for a part of Andaman 
& Nicobar islands covering Wandoor Marine National Park. This study area also known as Mahatma Gandhi Marine National Park 
is an important protected area, notified for the protection of marine life, including corals and sea turtles on May 24, 1983 under the 
Wildlife (Protection) Act of 1972. The two data sets were registered using ERDAS IMAGINE software with an accuracy of 9.24 m 
in X-direction and 10.34 m in Y-direction and an over all accuracy of 13.87 m ( - one half of a pixel). A total of 17 GCPs were 
selected for registration. A common Area of Interest (A.O.I) was then extracted covering the Marine National Park including Jolly 
Boys island (one of the permitted tourist islands in the area). The images are then classified and filtered and then was used by the 
query shell to generate the maps. The maps will be useful to find the causes of different changes for zoning the area into 
preservation, conservation, development and utilization zones for management and sustainable development. 
1. INTRODUCTION a customized software for change detection analysis and 
monitoring of an area over a period of tome. This paper 
The Andaman and Nicobar Islands are endowed with a great 
deal of natural beauty. Their flora and fauna are of a special 
type, having a high degree of bio-diversity and endemism. The 
coral reefs of these islands are among the richest in the Indian 
Sub-continent, which not only protects the coastline against the 
sea erosion but also harbour host of animal communities. 
However, increased forest extraction, development of tourism, 
setting up of colonies for settlers are some of the activities 
which have lead to a great deal of apprehensions that the unique 
and fragile ecosystem would be irreversibly degraded by these 
development efforts. This requires a continuous monitoring of 
coastal land use and specifically the critical habitats in regular 
intervals of time for its sustainable development.. As Remote 
Sensing data have been proved to be very useful for land use 
mapping while GIS is a powerful tool for analysis so an 
integrated approach of using Remote Sensing data and GIS 
capabilities can help in the development of a methodology and 
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presents a ‘Query Shell’ developed for generating change 
detection maps of Wandoor Marine National Park of Andaman 
islands i) showing the areas having no change in land use/ land 
cover categories with their aerial extent and ii) delineating 
those areas which changes from one category to another over a 
period of time. The query shell has been developed around 
ARC/INFO GIS and requires either multi-temporal registered 
classified raster data or vector coverages only. The legend, 
scale, areas of different land use categories etc. are generated 
automatically. The pre-requisit of. generating change detection 
maps are i) registration of two data sets should be performed 
as accurately as possible taking good number of GCPs 
distributed uniformly over the entire area ii) for coastal areas, 
the tidal conditions should be nearly same and iii) mixed pixel 
area should be selected properly. Here mixed pixels refer to 
those pixels usually at the edges of different land use categories 
which fall in the adjacent categories in two data sets acquired