TITLE:
Change Detection of Desert Sand Dunes: A Remote Sensing Approach
AUTHORS:
Surender Varma, Vatsal Shah, Biplab Banerjee, Krishna Mohan Buddhiraju
KEYWORDS:
Change Detection; Desert Land Forms; Monitoring Sand Dunes
JOURNAL NAME:
Advances in Remote Sensing,
Vol.3 No.1,
March
4,
2014
ABSTRACT: Deserts are one of the major landforms on the
Earth. While deserts occupy about one-fifth of Earth’s land surface, they have been studied to a
much lesser extent. All over the world, desert landforms are expanding ever
rapidly and more and more human settlements are finding place in desert regions
for habitation. Thus, quantifying and monitoring dunes becomes more relevant
from a managerial perspective. Analyzing desert areas using satellite imagery
is a challenging task due to weak textural differences and nearly homogeneous
spectral responses in most parts of the terrain. In this paper, a
post-clustering methodology for change detection of desert sand dunes is proposed.
Features based on Radon spectrum are used to cluster dunes of various
orientations. These clustered boundaries are used to detect if there are any
changes occurring in the dune regions. In the experiments, remote sensing data
covering various dune regions of the world are observed for possible changes in
dune orientations. In all the cases, it is seen that there are no major changes
in desert dune orientations since three decades.