User intervention is reduced from manually digitizing cut block boundaries to pointing and clicking on clear cut segments. The boundaries can be used as a mask to geographically constrain the remotely sensed data to the appropriate area. The constrained image is segmented. Classification on this segmented image can help to ascertain certain structural units such as forest at various stages of growth, rock outcrops, and areas of forest cover change. Such a result from the segmentation process is shown in Figure 3.
Structural units are clearly visible in the image as polygons.
After classification, we obtain the result shown in Figure 4. In the final step of updating the polygon attribute database, the forest cover change polygons of Figure 4 are exported to the GIS data. The segments are clearly visible in this result prior to classification. Old growth appears as dark gray, younger vegetation areas appear as lighter shades of gray, and recent cut-blocks and rock outcrops appear as white. Water appears as black.