Identification of a rural-urban fringe based on wavelet transform-a case study of wuhan

The identification of the rural-urban fringe is a hotspot in the rural-urban fringe research field. However, fussy indictors, threshold value methods, and identifying fringe respectively are usually used according to existing research approaches. We however, introduced the wavelet transform method to identify rural-urban fringe through detect mutation point group of LUDCI values based on modulus maxima of wavelet transform, after an analysis of the relationship between land use degree comprehensive index (LUDCI) and rural-urban fringe. Along each profile from central city to suburb, the inner boundary of a rural-urban fringe is where a mutation point group appears, while the external boundary is where mutation point group disappears. Wuhan is experiencing rapid urbanization, and therefore were chosen to implement a case study. The db3 Daubechies wavelet function was selected as the mother wavelet, and wavelet transform was scale 3.The visualization of mutation point detection results were performed using ARCGIS. These case study results suggest that the two rural-urban fringe boundaries could be identified together. Our results show that this method is a stricter and more efficient approach for identifying rural-urban fringes than other methods. © 2016, Wuhan University. All right reserved.