Detection of land cover changes by compound classification of multitemporal images

In this paper the problem of detecting land cover changes by using multitemporal remote sensing images is addressed. An approach aimed to explicitly identify what kind of land cover transition has actually taken place in an area proposed. This approach is based on the compound classification of multitemporal images. In particular, a simple model to represent the probabilities of transition is exploited to strongly simplify the compound classification task. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is confirmed by experimental results obtained by using remote sensing images containing simulated land cover transitions.