Delineation of Open-Pit Mining Boundaries on Multispectral Imagery

Abstract

During the last decades, monitoring the spatial growth of open-pit mining areas has become a common procedure in an effort to comprehend the influence that mining activities have on the adjacent land-use/land-cover types. Various case studies have been presented, focusing on land-cover mapping of complex mining landscapes. They highlight that a rapid as well as accurate approach is critical. This paper presents a methodological framework for a rapid delineation of open-pit mining area boundaries. For that purpose an Object-Based Image Analysis (OBIA) methodology is implemented. Sentinel-2 data were obtained and the Mean-Shift segmentation algorithm was employed. Among the many methods that have been presented in literature in order to evaluate the performance of an image segmentation, an unsupervised approach is carried out. A quantitative evaluation of segmentation accuracy leads to a more targeted selection of segmentation parameter values and as a consequence is of utmost importance. The proposed methodology was mainly conducted through python scripts and may constitute a guide for relevant studies.