Detection of land cover change in Beijing from TM images

This paper focuses on the detection of land cover change in Beijing using TM data collected on 22 May, 2002 and 20 May, 2010 respectively. For detailed analyzing the land cover change in different parts of Beijing, the central Beijing enclosed by fifth ring road was divided into 4 areas based on the ring roads. After image registration, mask and image clip, sample data of land cover types as water body, green land, bare land and construction land were trained, classification was performed using maximum likelihood method. Accuracy assessment was conducted according to ground truth of regions of interest. The conversion matrix was used to detect the land cover change from 2002 to 2010. The results showed that construction land increased in each area, and other land cover types decreased, especially for green land which diminished a lot during this period. This is consistent with the real status of the urbanization in Beijing.