Abstract In mapping organizations, the implementation of more automation coupled with the availability of heterogeneous data requires the investigation, adaptation and evaluation of new approaches and techniques. The demand for rapid mapping operations such as database generation and updating is continuously increasing. Due to the rising use of raster data, image analysis techniques have been investigated and tested in this study to introduce automation in the assessment of scanned topographic monochrome maps and Landsat 7 ETM+ imagery for feature separation and extraction in northern Canada. The work focuses on the detection and extraction of lakes -predominant features in the North -as well as on to their spatiotemporal comparison. Various approaches using digital image processing techniques were implemented and evaluated. Thresholding and texture measures were used to evaluate the potential of rapid extraction of certain topographic elements from scanned monochrome maps of northern Canada. A raster to vector approach (R ! V) followed for the vectorization of these extracted features. The extraction of features from Landsat 7 ETM+ imagery involved image and theme enhancement by applying various image fusion and spectral transformations (e.g., Brovey, PCI-IMGFUSE, intensity -hue -saturation (IHS), principal component analysis (PCA), Tasseled Cap, Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI)), followed by image classification and thresholding. Tests showed that the approaches were more or less feature-dependent, while, at the same time, they can augment and significantly enhance the conventional topographic mapping methods. Following the analysis of the map and image data, change detection between two lake datasets was performed both interactively and in an automated mode based on the non-intersection of old and new features. The various approaches and methodology developed and implemented within a GIS environment along with examples, results and limitations are presented and discussed. Crow
