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

Yaping Xu; Lei Wang; Chengliang Liu; Cuiling Liu; Yaping Xu; Lei Wang; Chengliang Liu; Cuiling Liu

doi:10.3934/geosci.2017.2.268

AIMS Geosciences

2017, Volume 3, Issue 2: 268-283. doi: 10.3934/geosci.2017.2.268

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Research article

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

1.
Department of Geography and Anthropology, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803, USA
2.
School of Urban and Regional Science, East China Normal University, Shanghai 200062, China

Received: 14 February 2017 Accepted: 20 June 2017 Published: 29 June 2017

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.
- Cultural relic site protection,
- buildings identification,
- subpixel mapping,
- mixture-tuned match filtering (mtmf),
- Landsat
Citation: Yaping Xu, Lei Wang, Chengliang Liu, Cuiling Liu. Identifying Unlawful Constructions in Cultural Relic Sites Based on Subpixel Mapping—a Case Study in Mangshan Tombs, China[J]. AIMS Geosciences, 2017, 3(2): 268-283. doi: 10.3934/geosci.2017.2.268

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Abstract

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.

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