ROLE OF SPATIAL RESOLUTION AND SPECTRAL CONTENT IN CHANGE DETECTION.

Summary form only given, as follows. Advancements in remote sensing technology have brought improvements and sophistication to modern remote sensor systems, especially those aboard earth resources satellites. These improvements have considerbly expanded the capabilities of the newer sensor systems, particularly the capability to achieve greatly increased spatial and spectral resolution levels. The debate still lingers, however, over whether future systems should maximize spatial resolution or spectral information, or both. As yet, the high costs and large volumes of data associated with even modest incremental improvements in spatial and spectral content have precluded the design of a single system that attempts to fully optimize both. Thus, the user is faced with having to choose between those systems providing high spatial resolutions but limited spectral information and those which offer a broad range of spectral data but hold spatial resolution to a less than optimum level. In this study, the contribution of both spatial resolution and spectral content to land cover change detection is examined. Ten-meter SPOT simulation imagery is compared with multispectral images acquired by the Thematic Mapper sensor system for use in the visual interpretation and mapping of changes. Several image processing and enhancement techniques are utilized to maximize the spatial and spectral data content offered by each system. Results indicate that when using visual image interpretation techniques to detect change, higher spatial resolutions are generally preferred over increased spectral content.