On the application of remote sensing towards the estimation of cultivated land lost to urbanization

摘要

In this research work, a 40-km(2) SPOT-5 High-Resolution Imagery (HRI) of the Warsak locality in district Peshawar, Pakistan, was utilized to approximate the quantity of cultivated land lost to urbanization, due to the construction of new homes and buildings. The imagery from a period of 2005 to 2015 for wheat crop was taken, specifically during the months of March and June when the crop is rich green and golden ripe respectively. eCognition (R) program's Object-Oriented Classification Method (OOCM) was employed for recognition of land versus buildings. Nearest Neighbour (NN), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Decision Trees (DT) and Random Forests (RF) were utilized for the classification process. The results demonstrated that the urbanized area had increased by approximately 28 per cent in the area considered. Moreover, the efficacy of the proposed method is depicted by an accuracy of 97.9 per cent and a Kappa Statistics of 0.975 for the SVM classifier.