A comparative study on change vector analysis based change detection techniques

Detection of Earth surface changes are essential to monitor regional climatic, snow avalanche hazard analysis and energy balance studies that occur due to air temperature irregularities. Geographic Information System (GIS) enables such research activities to be carried out through change detection analysis. From this viewpoint, different change detection algorithms have been developed for land-use land-cover (LULC) region. Among the different change detection algorithms, change vector analysis (CVA) has level headed capability of extracting maximum information in terms of overall magnitude of change and the direction of change between multispectral bands from multi-temporal satellite data sets. Since past two three decades, many effective CVA based change detection techniques e.g., improved change vector analysis (ICVA), modified change vector analysis (MCVA) and change vector analysis posterior-probability space (CVAPS), have been developed to overcome the difficulty that exists in traditional change vector analysis (CVA). Moreover, many integrated techniques such as cross correlogram spectral matching (CCSM) based CVA. CVA uses enhanced principal component analysis (PCA) and inverse triangular (IT) function, hyper-spherical direction cosine (HSDC), and median CVA (m-CVA), as an effective LULC change detection tools. This paper comprises a comparative analysis on CVA based change detection techniques such as CVA, MCVA, ICVA and CVAPS. This paper also summarizes the necessary integrated CVA techniques along with their characteristics, features and shortcomings. Based on experiment outcomes, it has been evaluated that CVAPS technique has greater potential than other CVA techniques to evaluate the overall transformed information over three different MODerate resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) satellite data sets of different regions. Results of this study are expected to be potentially useful for more accurate analysis of LULC changes which will, in turn, improve the utilization of CVA based change detection techniques for such applications.