CHANGE DETECTION ANALYSIS BY USING IKONOS IMAGERY 
T. Sirinyildiz 
* INTA SPACETURK, Haymana yolu 12.Km 06830 Gólbasi, Ankara, Turkey — 
tsirinyildiz@spaceturk.com.tr 
+90.312.6122370/5157 
PS WG V/4 
KEY WORDS: /KONOS, Change Detection, Resolution, Earthquakes, Satellites. 
ABSTRACT: 
Earthquake is the most known and harmful disaster for human beings. Especially after 17th August 1999 earthquake in Turkey, it is 
seen that we have to learn to live with this earthquake disaster. In order to decrease the damage of the earthquakes, precautions has 
to be taken. In addition to that, at the moment of earthquake and after earthquake, for intervention processes the use of satellite 
imagery and remote sensing techniques can play a vital role. Discriminations of collapsed buildings, bridges and similar man made 
features could easily be detect by using satellite imagery. In order to detect collapsed buildings, two images are needed, that are 
collected on different times. There is two way to detect collapsed buildings by using IKONOS satellite imagery. One of them is visual 
interpretation. Collapsed buildings can be digitized or detected manually by user. The second way is change detection analysis. For 
change detection analysis, two images and building layer (vector map) is needed. By using these data set collapsed buildings can be 
detected 
1. INTRODUCTION 
Remote sensing born with an image, collected from a balloon in 
1850 (Aronoff 1991). A camera was first assembled to an 
aircraft by Wilbur Wright in 1909. After that time, remote 
sensing data was started to use in several areas. Especially the 
importance of the remote sensing has again understood in the 
second world war. 
In order to meet the needs to the remote sensing data, the 
numbers of the satellites are getting increase day by day. The 
technical specifications such as; spatial resolution, radiometric Landsat 30 Meter SPOT 10 Meter 
resolution, temporal resolution, vv. of the satellites are getting 
improve too. Usage areas of the remote sensing data become 
wider, together with developing technology. 
The spatial resolution of the satellite sensors can be 
characterized by the ability of defining the object boundaries 
(Colwell 1983). It is also possible to define the spatial 
resolution as, the area of a representative pixel on the ground. 
IKONOS satellite has a spatial coverage of 1 meter. In other 
words, objects having | meter distance with each other on the 
ground can be identified. Moreover, if there is a contrast in the 
media (like tennis court lines or highway lane lines), details can 
be more distinctive and clearly identified. Different spatial 
resolutions of different satellites are given in Figure 1. 
   
KVR-1000 2 Meter IKONOS 1 Meter 
Figure 1. Satellite imageries in different spatial resolutions. 
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