Identifying Unlawful Constructions in Cultural Relic Sites Based on Subpixel Mapping—a Case Study in Mangshan Tombs, China

• Main Authors: Yaping Xu, Lei Wang, Chengliang Liu, Cuiling Liu
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: AIMS Press 2017-06-01
• Series: AIMS Geosciences
• Subjects: Cultural relic site protection; buildings identification; subpixel mapping; mixture-tuned match filtering (mtmf); Landsat
• Online Access: http://www.aimspress.com/geosciences/article/1495/fulltext.html

Monitoring unlawful constructions in cultural relic sites is difficult in remote and unpopulated areas. This paper aims at facilitating cultural relic protection surveys using remote sensing. High-resolution remote sensing images are better alternatives to field visits for locating unlawful buildings. However, these buildings are usually hidden by vast wildness around the cultural relics, which makes the use of high-resolution imagery costly and inefficient. The main purpose of this research is to develop an approach to subpixel building identification from moderate resolution images, such as Landsat 8 OLI with reasonable accuracy based on the mixture-tuned match filtering (MTMF) partial unmixing method. With this method, pixels with high MF scores and low MT scores were identified as candidate locations of possible unlawful buildings. A case study in the Mangshan Tombs, China demonstrated that this method had a better accuracy for identifying constructions than the commonly used fully-constrained linear unmixing model.