Remote sensing classification method of vegetation dynamics based on time series Landsat image: a case of opencast mining area in China

Abstract Time series remote sensing image is an important resource for dynamic monitoring of resources and environment, and its abundant time spectrum information can be used to characterize the dynamic change of vegetation coverage. This paper proposes a comprehensive clustering and pixel classification method for extracting the vegetation dynamics based on time series Landsat normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI). This method uses the time-division algorithm for fitting time-series NDVI firstly. And the Markov random field optimized (MRF) semi-supervised dynamic time warping (DTW) kernel fuzzy c-means clustering was constructed. Then the MRF-optimized semi-supervised DTW-kernel fuzzy c-means clustering was combined with the 1-nearest neighbor (1NN) DTW pixel classification to realize the extraction of vegetation dynamics. Shengli Opencast Coal Mine in The Xilin Gol Grassland was taken as the study area to analyze the applicability of the different classification methods. The results showed the fusion algorithm of the MRF-Semi-GDTW-FCM and 1NN-DTW generates accurate classification results with the overall accuracy of 93.8806% and Kappa coefficient of 0.9267, which were 1.7219, 0.0182, and 20.4080% and 0.2916 higher than the clustering and pixel classification, respectively. Experiments proof that the method proposed in this paper is not only simple but also accurate and effective.