Land Use Land Cover Classification of Kanyakumari District Using Satellite Imagery

Abstract

A modern nation must have adequate information on complex interrelated aspects of its activities in order to make decisions and solve problems. Land use land cover is one such aspect. Land use is defined as the observed physical cover on the earth s surface and land cover describes the vegetation and artificial constructions covering the land. Knowledge about land use land lover has become increasingly important as the nation plans to overcome the problems of haphazard, uncontrolled development, deteriorating environmental quality, loss of prime agricultural lands, destruction of important wetlands and deforestation. So, land use land cover classification is considered as one of the most active research and application in the present era. Keeping this in to consideration the present research has concentrated on the analysis of the swiftly growing Kanyakumari District that has preserved natural beauty, healthy medicinal plants, and natural water resources, rich in culture, tradition and urbanization. Land use land cover changes of Kanyakumari District, has caused the greatest environmental impact on vegetation, forest, ground water pollution and also deterioration of bare land with more built-up and dumping of garbage. Multispectral satellite imagery is the prime source considered for the analysis of Kanyakumari District. In this analysis the differentiation of satellite images in to predefined land use land cover classes is proposed. newlineThe proposed method is an approach for Preprocessing, Feature Extraction and Classification. Preprocessing carried out in this analysis has removed the unwanted effects of atmosphere and increased the brightness level of the image and achieved a clear image for feature extraction. Feature extraction performed in Landsat image has extracted six features which include two land use and four land cover features which were used to train the image for better classification. The classification of the heterogeneous area of Kanyakumari District is explored using seven classification