Chinese Geographical Science 2007 17(3) 236–242

DOI: 10.1007/s11769-007-0236-1
www.springerlink.com

Object-oriented Urban Dynamic Monitoring

—A Case Study of Haidian District of Beijing

AN Kai1, 2, ZHANG Jinshui3, 4, XIAO Yu1

(1. Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences,
Beijing 100101, China; 2. Graduate University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China;
3. Key Laboratory of Environmental Change and Natural Disaster, Ministry of Education of China,
Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China; 4. College of Resources Science & Technology,
Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China)

Abstract: It is crucial to conduct the land use/cover research to obtain the global change information. Urban area is
one of the most sensitive areas in land use/cover change. Therefore land use/cover change in urban areas is very im-
portant in global change. It is vital to incorporate the information of urban land use/cover change into the process of
decision-making about urban area development. In this paper, a new urban change detection approach, urban dynamic
monitoring based on objects, is introduced. This approach includes four steps: 1) producing multi-scale objects from
multi-temporal remotely sensed images with spectrum, texture and context information; 2) extracting possible changed
objects adopting object-oriented classification; 3) obtaining shared objects as the basic units for urban change detection;
4) determining the threshold to segment the changed objects from the possible changed objects using Otsu method. In
this paper, the object-based approach was applied to detecting the urban expansion in Haidian District, Beijing, China
with two Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) data in 1997 and 2004. The results indicated that the overall accuracy was
about 84.83%, and Kappa about 0.785. Compared with other conventional approaches, the object-based approach was
advantageous in reducing the error accumulation of image classification of each datum and in independence to the ra-
diometric correction and image registration accuracy.
Keywords: urban change detection; object-oriented method; remote sensing; land use/cover; Otsu method

1 Introduction remotely sensed data can be generally grouped as two

Land use/cover research is one of the most important
ways for people to obtain the global change information.
Timely and accurately detecting the change of earth’s
surface features is extremely essential to understand the
relationships and interactions between human and natural
systems in order to promote better decision making
(Heilig, 1995). Urban is the most sensitive area in land
use/cover change. To obtain the urban land use/cover
change information is crucial for the decision-making on
the sustainable development in urban areas. Remotely
sensed data have been introduced into land use/cover
change detection widely since the 1970s. The conven-
tional land use/cover change detection approach with
types—one is spectral classification-based approach, and
the other is pixel-by-pixel radiometric comparison ap-
proach. Both approaches have their limitations which
influence the land use/cover detection use seriously
(Michalek et al., 1993; Lambin and Strahlers, 1994). The
former has the obvious limitation of its cumulative error
in image classification of an individual datum and the
latter needs the strict radiometric correction. Both of
them need the accurate image registration.
Object-oriented change detection approach is a newly
developed method to extract the land use/cover change
information. There have been some of studies discussing
this approach (Bruzzone and Prieto, 2000; Hall and Hay,
2003; Walter, 2004; He et al., 2005). Ecological theories,

Received date: 2006-09-20; accepted date: 2007-02-05

Foundation item: Under the auspices of the National High Technology Research and Development Program of China (No.
2003AA132020)
Corresponding author: AN Kai. E-mail: ankai@supermap.com
 Object-oriented Urban Dynamic Monitoring 237

in particular hierarchy theory, have been incorporated such as image co-registration and radiometric correction,
into this approach to predict the changes in landscape were performed to pre-process the data.
spatial pattern and temporal scales at which they are
assessed (Allen and Starr, 1982; Lambin and Strahlers,
1994). He et al. (2005) obtained the land use/cover
detection information with the objects’ similarity
approach. Walter (2004) segmented the image using
GIS database to obtain the change information. Laliberte
et al. (2004) analyzed shrub encroachment from 1937 to
2003 in the southern New Mexico. Bruzzone and Prieto
(2000) presented a parcel-based technique for unsuper-
vised change detection. Hall and Hay (2003) executed
the digital change detection with a multi-scale
object-specific approach. The examples adopting the
object-oriented method have been proved to be more
successful in analyzing the land use/cover than
conventional method though there are still some
limitations for the object-oriented method needed to be
improved, for instance the operator’s knowledge of the
object-oriented classification and change detection
results in errors, and land use/cover change detection
needs accurate image registration.
The limitations of conventional land use/cover change
detection and object-oriented approaches are both
influenced by the sensor and the image registration. And
the change threshold can not be determined easily. In Fig. 1 Framework of object-oriented
this paper, an object-oriented method with the spectral urban change detection
and texture information is adopted to extract the urban
change information and the Otsu method is introduced 2.2 Multi-temporal image segmentation
to determine the threshold automatically. This method The multi-temporal image segmentation was performed
can amend some of limitations of post-classification, with the software of object-oriented software, i.e., e-
such as producing error accumulation and destroying the Cognition. During the segmentation, the spectral and
spatial information. spatial information was used to delineate the suitable
segments in the image. According to their different
2 Framework of Object-oriented Urban Chan- spectra, textures, structures and contexts, multi-scale
ge Detection objects were extracted from two images at different time.
The objects’ sizes are different, but similar to the actual
In order to determine whether the object changed, the land cover sizes. The object-oriented classes were taken
shared objects’ magnitude of two co-registered images by the object-oriented software to demarcate the seg-
was calculated on the object unit with the approach of mentation. It would be noted in our study that all land
object-oriented urban change detection. The components covers were merged into two classes—one is the
of the framework of the object-oriented urban change non-urban land which includes water and vegetation and
detection were shown in Fig. 1. the other is urban land which includes all other land
cover types except water and vegetation.
2.1 Data pre-processing
First of all, in order to reduce the discrimination of the 2.3 Extraction of possible changed objects
multi-temporal images, the fundamental operations, There are two land cover change directions in this study,
238 AN Kai, ZHANG Jinshui, XIAO Yu
i.e., the change from urban objects to non-urban objects
and the reverse. After overlapping the image data in two
temporal scales which have been merged into two land
cover types, four types of changed land were obtained:
urban to urban, non-urban to non-urban, urban to
non-urban, non-urban to urban. The latter two types
were defined as the possible changed land type, while
the former two types, which were classified accurately,
were considered as unchanged land type. The possible
changed objects were emphasized during the urban
object-oriented change detection.
2.4 Computation of multi-temporal shared objects’
magnitude
Suppose there were two co-registered multi-temporal
images (X1 and X2) acquired in the same area at two
different times (t1 and t2), and objects A and B were ex-
tracted from the X1 and X2, respectively. The shared
object of these two images was defined as the intersec-
tion of object A and object B. According to the research
of He et al. (2005), the shared objects were obtained by
overlaying the multi-temporal objects.
Texture property is the pixel frequency of the images,
which is the synthesis of the objects’ shape, size,
shadow and hue, and reflects the local pixels’ gray value
and hue, and rules. The texture property of the same
land type is stable and independent of time, which is
usually adopted to analyze the image change along time.
In this study, the change information can be extracted
with spectral and texture information. These two kinds
of information were combined with the layer-stack op-
eration.
The Euclidean distance was computed based on the
shared object with the CVA (Change Vector Analysis)
approach (Chen et al., 2001). The change vector
describes the spectral vector from time 1 to time 2.
The two temporal gray vectors are defined as G=(g1,
g2, …, gk)T and H=(h1, h2, …, hk)T. The change
magnitude of shared objects was defined as below:
⎛ g1 − h1 ⎞
⎜ ⎟
g − h2 ⎟
ΔG = G − H = ⎜ 2 (1)
⎜ ... ⎟
⎜ ⎟
⎝ g k − hk ⎠
where ΔG is the change mangitude of shared objects; gk
and hk are the properties, such as spectral and texture
information, based on the object unit extracted from
the temporal gray vector G and H, respectively.
2.5 Setting of threshold by Otsu algorithm
As traditional threshold often involves a subjective
decision based on an examination of the histogram
structure or the artificial selection, Otsu (1979) proposed
a non-parametric and unsupervised method of automatic
threshold selection for image segmentation in CVA to
reduce the subjectivity. The optimal threshold was
selected based on a discriminated criterion, so as to
maximize the separability of the resultant classes in gray
levels (Otsu, 1979).
2.6 Setting of threshold to segment objects
It was hypothesized that the difference in texture
between urban and non-urban is great. Thus, the texture
properties of the objects changed greatly when the urban
land use converting to non-urban or non-urban to urban.
The changed objects extracted from the images will
satisfy the follow formula:
⎧1( S > TOtsu )⎫
O=⎨ ⎬ (2)
⎩0 ( S < TOtsu )⎭
where O is the state of object, S is the change magnitude;
TOtsu is the threshold that is the boundary of changed and
unchanged objects. If S was greater than TOtsu, it indica-
ted that object had changed. Otherwise, object had not
changed.
3 Case Study
3.1 Study area and data collection
Haidian District, located in the western and northwest-
ern Beijing, with an area of 416km2, was selected as
study area. The landform of the district is higher in the
west and lower in the east. A plain with an average
altitude of 50m takes up 3/4 of this district. There are
some pools and ponds in the plain. With the economic
development, the urbanization in Haidian District is
significant. There were a lot of cultivated lands in 1997,
which disappeared and changed into the urban in 2004.
The urban change detection was executed in this district
with the object-oriented change detection approach.
The cloud-free Landsat TM (123/32) images with the
pixel size of 30m×30m acquired on 1997-05-16 and
2004-5-19 were collected. The TM3, TM4 and TM5
 Object-oriented Urban Dynamic Monitoring 239

bands were selected to extract urban change informa-
tion.
With two rank polynomial and double linear interpo-
lation algorithm, geometric correction was conducted on
the TM image in 1997 with the TM image in 1999. The
TM image in 2004 was corrected with that in 1997. Af-
ter examination, RMS (Root Mean Square) is less than
one pixel. Finally, the area of Haidian District was ex-
tracted from the two corrected images.
3.2 Extraction of possible changed objects
The multi-scale objects from the two TM images were
extracted with the software of eCognition3.0. The spec-
tral parameter was set as 0.8, the shape parameter was
set as 0.2, and the smooth and density parameters were
set as 0.9 and 0.1, respectively. The homogeneous object
contains at least 20 pixels, which avoids producing min-
ute size objects and satisfies the urban/non-urban
change's basic unit. As mentioned above, the land cover
types were grouped into two kinds—one was urban in-
cluding buildings, streets, bridges and other constructed
areas, the other was non-urban including forestlands,
grasslands, rice fields, gardens and other vegetation ar-
eas.
The results indicated that a lot of objects were ex-
tracted from the two corrected TM images based on the
parcel units with the approach of object-oriented change
detection (Fig. 2, the subset of the image). The parcels
were easily divided into the urban and non-urban land
types.

Fig. 2 Objects of Haidian District extracted from images of 1997 and 2004
240 AN Kai, ZHANG Jinshui, XIAO Yu

The two corrected TM images of Haidian District were
overlapped with the map algebra to obtain the possible
changed objects. Thus, four types of changed land were
produced, including urban, urban to non-urban, non-
urban to urban and non-urban. The non-urban to urban
and urban to non-urban were taken as the possible
changed objects (Fig. 3).
A hypothesis can be drawn that the change magnitude
between the changed and unchanged objects is greatly
different. Based on the Otsu algorithm, the threshold was
set as 44.03 to clearly distinguish the changed objects
from the unchanged objects (Fig. 4). This Otsu threshold
was used to segment the possible changed objects into
changed or unchanged objects (Fig. 5).

Fig. 4 Threshold of object-oriented change detection

Fig. 3 Extraction of possible changed objects

of Haidian District in 1997-2004

3.3 Overlapping of spectral and texture data

The spectral and texture information was integrated to
extract the change information. The Gray Level
Co-occurrence (GLCC) matrix which was brought up by
Haralic has been widely used during the computation of
texture character (Zhang et al., 2003). There are 14 in-
dexes of calculating texture characteristic, and such
eight of them as Mean, Variance, Homogeneity, Con-
trast, Dissimilarity, Entropy, Angular Second Moment
and Correlation were adopted in this study. The 5×5
window size was the optimum size to extract the change Fig. 5 Result of object-oriented change detection
information as applied by He et al. (2005). Totally 54
layers of data were combined, including 6 layers of 4 Accuracy Assessment
spectral and 48 layers of texture information.
The 600 checked points were selected with the equal-
3.4 Searching of threshold by Otsu algorithm ized random sampling method to compare the approach
According to Equation (1), the change magnitude map, of object-oriented urban change detection with the
which is the gray level data, was computed by the infor- post-classification change detection approach. The re-
mation incorporating the texture and spectral information. sults indicated that the change detection information
 Object-oriented Urban Dynamic Monitoring 241

was obtained more effectively with the object-oriented about 84.83%, and Kappa about 0.785, while the overall
approach than the post-classification approach. The accuracy of the post-classification approach was about
overall accuracy of the object-oriented approach was 74.00%, and Kappa about 0.480 (Table1 and Table 2).

Table 1 Accuracy of object-oriented change detection

Validated data
Item
Changed Unchanged Total Producer's accuracy (%) Loss error (%)

Changed 281 19 300 93.7 6.3

Unchanged 72 228 300 76.0 24.0

Total 353 247 600

Producer's accuracy (%) 79.6 92.3

Loss error (%) 20.4 7.7

Note: Overall accuracy=84.83%, Kappa=0.785

Table 2 Accuracy of post-classification change detection

Validated data
Item
Changed Unchanged Total Producer's accuracy (%) Loss error (%)

Changed 128 22 150 85.3 14.7

Unchanged 56 94 150 60.0 37.3

Total 184 116 300

Producer's accuracy (%) 69.6 81.0

Loss error (%) 30.4 29.0

Note: Overall accuracy =74.00%, Kappa = 0.480

5 Conclusions tection approach, the object-oriented method reduced

In this study, the urban land use/cover change informa-
tion was extracted from the spectrum and texture infor-
mation with the object-oriented approach. The results
indicated that the object-oriented change detection ap-
proach extracted the urban or non-urban change infor-
mation more effectively than the post-classification ap-
proach. The overall accuracy of the object-oriented ap-
proach was 84.83% and Kappa was 0.785.
With the object-oriented approach, the urban/non-
urban change information was extracted by using spec-
tral and texture information. The texture would not
change with the time and could not need the strict ra-
diometric correction. The texture information was ap-
plied to extracting the change information from the im-
ages acquired by the different sensors.
In the object-oriented approach, the Otsu algorithm
was used to obtain the threshold effectively with which
the change/unchanged objects could be differentiated
accurately. Compared with the conventional change de-
the co-registration influence to some extent as it was
based on object unit.
In the study, only two types of information were com-
bined to detect the urban change status. Actually, more
kinds of information need to be integrated to more ac-
curately detect the change information. Thus, there are
still some of problems need to be settled in the process
of land use/cover change detection.
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