A Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Master of Science, School of Environment, Resources and Development

Thesis (M.Sc.) - Asian Institute of Technology, 1995

This study mainly focuses on mapping urban and rural fringe environment change caused by industrialization and urbanization by means of integration of remote sensing techniques and geographic information system (GIS). In this study, the ERS-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar and the Landsat Thematic Mapper data were assessed for application of the urban and rural fringe environment in mapping accuracy and discrimination of land cover. A single synergistic data (microwave and visible infrared), a visible infrared (VIR) and thermal infrared (TIR) data, a single frequency but multi-track microwave data were evaluated to acquire information contents and capacity of discrimination. The results indicated that the change detection, the integrated multi-sensor(synergistic), multi-spectral and multi-temporal data with GIS provided more information and higher accuracy than remote sensing data alone, especially, single sensor, single frequency. An noticeable results is that thermal infrared band of Thematic Mapper was applied in the landuse/cover mapping by means of Prince Components Analysis which extracted the thermal information and improved the resolution, some specific classes were identified due to the contribution of Thermal Infrared band.