The Application of Geo-informatics Technology to Analyze Land Use Changes Using Satellite Imagery

Abstract

Intruding to Royal Thai Army’s (RTA) Lands is continuously a concern to the organization. Thus, RTA has to find the solutions for their lands management so that it will not impact the ability to train and work within their military properties. This also includes the safety of life and property of people who encroach for various activities inside the military areas. This research has brought a technology called Geo-informatics to help with the land management. The main objective of this research is to use Geo-informatics for the analysis of change detection in land use derived from satellite images in order to monitor the change of the areas including forest, residential and agricultural areas. This process increases the efficiency of the work, and reduces the amount of time and labors for the monitoring without being in the areas where they could be dangerous.  This study has classified satellite images acquired from Landsat 5, Landsat 8 and THEOS sensors using Supervised Classification with Maximum Likelihood method. The study area covers the sub-district of Huay Pong, Kok Sumrong district in the province of Lopburi. The classification has classified into 6 types of land use, which consist of Man-made, forests, water, agricultures, shrubs, and other types of vegetation. The results from three different sensors collected throughout the year have shown that there are some changes in the land use. For example, forested areas have been converted to agricultural areas or man-made structures. Another instance is the change from agricultural areas to man-made objects or other land features. The accuracy assessment has been performed on this research as well and it shows that the overall accuracy has fallen in between 70.00% – 93.33 %, which considers as high accuracy. These have agreed with the results of the Cohen’s kappa coefficient (K), which fall in the range of 0.64 – 0.92. The results of this research have been visualized through a web application. In conclusion, the use of Geo-informatics technology is a decent tool to solve a problematic of RTA’s land encroachment.