Iraqi National Journal of Earth Sciences

Abstract

Recently, Satellite images became an important tools which were used in many cases of the practical studies, it has provide a widely view to the land covers and the ability to extract the information by applying the image processing technique on the images. The ability to detect the area of land covers from satellites images is very complex method because it is not only required a high geometrical satellite images but it needs to isolate each class from the classified image dependently from the another classes that viewed in the adopted image satellite. This process is very important to determine the area for each class with an accepted level of accuracy.
In the present study, an active method was design to extract and determine the areas by using digital image processing operations (digital filtering, geometrical registration and supervised classification). Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) satellite image, which covered the study area (Mosul Dam Lake), was adopted as a remote sensing data set for the processing stages. Geographical Information System (GIS) software was applied for the georeferencing process of the TM satellite image (according to UTM-WGS84-38N System) with respect to the georeferencing topographic map of the Mosul Dam.
The result of the applied method was compared with result obtained from the GIS software, Global Mapper 9.2 (GM9.2) for the same study area, and then the output results of the two methods were compared to the traditional method to calculate the area of the class from topographic maps according to their complete and missing squares. A relatively good coincidence between the result of the present study and the other methods. The results and the applied technique of this research are very important in the practical applications related to the field of survey engineering, environmental studies (desertification and environmental pollution), forest, urban planning, geology…etc.
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