Diseño e implementación de un sistema que evalúe la variación del área de una laguna y un nevado del ecuador mediante procesamiento de imágenes satelitales.

Abstract

The current degree work was aimed to design and implement a system that allows evaluating the variation of the area of a lagoon and a mountain in Ecuador through digital processing of satellite images. Yahuarcocha lagoon and the Cotopaxi mountain were taken to do this study due to many satellite images available without distortions. The images downloaded from the Landsat - 7 and Landsat - 8 satellite were obtained from the Earth Explorer platform, taking into account that the Landsat - 7 images must go through a Pre-Processing to improve their quality due to the failure of the Scan Line Corrector (SLC), so ArcGIS software was used. Subsequently, with the MATLAB software, the system in charge of the images processing was made. This process consists of making a cutout of the area of interest, generating a mask to obtain a more specific area, applying the thresholding to convert it into a binary image to be analyzed, calculate each image captured in different periods of the two analyzed water resources, and finally, show the results in a two-dimensional graph. Obtaining as a result that the values obtained are safe and reliable since the validation was carried out using 8 water resources, between lagoons and mountains, through inferential statistics with the Student's T-test for a sample. Furthermore, the system gives reliable values because a comparison was made with referenced hypothetical values from reliable bibliographies, and the null hypothesis was accepted in all analyzed cases. In addition, a mathematical prediction model was carried out using the polynomial of degree 1 to predict future behaviors. Therefore, it is advisable to perform the analysis with as many images as possible.