Quantitative updating of land use information on 1:50,000 scale topographic maps using spot landsat thematic mapper imagery

This report gives the results of a study carried out in the Remote Sensing Department of the National Aerospace Laboratory (NLR) in The Netherlands concerning the updating of land use on topographic maps using remote sensing information. It was found that SPOT multispectral imagery is less suitable for land use classification purposes than Landsat Thematic Mapper data due to the lack of a spectral band in the mid-infrared. The most promising approach for updating land use information on topographic maps on a raster image processing system as available at NLR, seems to be the use of digitized topographic map information at 10-m resolution together with Landsat Thematic Mapper data resampled to the same resolution. In this report, maps of change in land use are given. Such end product maps can technically be produced at a rate of 1-2 maps per week for all 120 maps sheets of The Netherlands. The main technical problem in the production of maps is the limited availability of cloudfree (summer) imagery. This availability has statistically been assessed to be once per two years on the average.