Detecting and Monitoring the Vegetal Cover of Karbala Province (Iraq) Using Change Detection Methods

Abstract

Karbala province was one of the most important areas in Iraq and considered an economic resource of vegetation such as trees of fruits, sieve and other vegetation. This research aimed to utilize change detection for investigating the current vegetation cover at last three decay. The main objectives of this research are collect a group of studied area (Karbala province) satellite images in sequence time for the same area, these image captured by Landsat (TM 1995, ETM+ 2005 and Landsat 8 OLI (Operational Land Imager) 2015. Preprocessing such as atmosphere correction and rectification has been done. Mosaic model between the parts of studied area was performing. Gap filling consider being very important step has been implied on the defected image which captured in Landsat 2005. For monitoring the changes in the studied area, many image processing such as supervised classification using Maximum likelihood classifier and support vector machine classifier have been applied. Target detection using matching filter and change detection using subtractive method also have been used to detect the change in vegetal cover of the studied area. Many histogram and statistical properties were illustrated as well as the pixel count and the target area has been computed.