Abstract
Natural and artificial land features are very dynamic, changing somewhat repidly in our lifetime. It is important that such changes are inventoried accurately so that the physical and human processes at work can be more fully understood. Change detection is a technique used to determine the change between two or more time periods of a particular object of study. Change detection is an important process in monitoring and managing natural resources and urban development because it provides quantitative analysis of the spatial distribution in the population of interest. The purpose of this research is to detect environmental changes surrounding an area of Mountain Moscow, Idaho using Landsat Thematic Maper (TM) images of (July 8, 1990 and July 20, 1991). For accurate classification, the Image enhancement process was performed for improving the image quality of each image. A SPOT image (Aug. 14, 1992) was used for image merging in this research. Supervised classification was performed using the maximum likelihood method. Accuracy assessments were done for each classification. Two images were compared on a pixel-by-pixel basis using the post-classification comparison method that is used for detecting the changes of the study area in this research. The 'from-to' change class information can be detected by post classification comparison using this method and we could find which class change to another.