, hot ’ ^erefore 
r °wn soil is the 
™ ate ' s clammy 
0,1 the plateau 
therefore it 
'PS alpine 
mes drier 
humus becomes 
Preforms 
and northwest of 
**• It covers the 
to 
an ? lake special 
lished in 1976 to 
This area has j 
:me Iy scattered, 
island locates at 
liter in the north 
and semi-desert 
hit. The Kunlun 
m resolution in 
idy data for this 
In order to have both high spatial resolution and multispectral 
feature, the panchromatic image with high spatial resolution and 
multispectral image were merged using PCA transformation, i.e. 
using the high spatial resolution image to instead the first 
principal component after multispectral image transformation. 
The true colour image could not be fused due to the lacking the 
Blue band in SPOT5. The 4, 3, 2 bands of the fusion image 
were used to fuse the pseudo colour image according to the 
purpose of the interpretation (see Figure 2). 
Image interpretation 
3.3.1 Classification system 
The standard for terrain classification of the interpretation 
results is the 1:50000 topographic mapping schema. 
3.3.2 Interpretation method 
The interpretation mainly uses visual interpretation, using the 
image (colour) hue, shadows, size shape, texture, pattern, 
location and combination to interpret elements, and ultimately 
determine the feature types. 
Ground object types 
Pastoral tents: The recognition of the pastoral tents mainly based on their shape and 
size on the image. They are difficult to be recognized on the 10m resolution 
multispectral image. However, on 2.5m resolution panchromatic image, the tents have 
regularly hexagonal shape and therefore they could be clearly recognized, but the 
residence month is uncertain. 
iretation process, 
th of the original 
on. therefore the 
: irst, the images 
ige to unify them 
the wo images 
tion. In practical 
September. 1999 
olynomial model 
n model, and the 
in resampling to 
results show that 
0 Hed within one 
iodel used in the 
model, and the 
j in resampling' 
, n e pixel (Meng, 
Normal houses: The extraction of normal houses depends on their shape, size, texture, 
pattern and combination to judge. Similar to the pastoral tents, they are difficult to be 
recognized on multispectral image. But on panchromatic image, these houses are 
shown as regular polygons with the regular shape and clear texture; therefore they can 
be clearly recognized. 
Roads for transporting: The interpretation mainly depends on their shape. On 
multispectral image, the roads are fuzzy and sometimes are mixed with the 
background; therefore they can’t be completely extracted. While on panchromatic 
image, they are clear and can be distinguished from the background.