Illegal dumping of industrial waste causes severe environmental damage. For minimizing the damage, it is important to find out an occurrence of illegal dumping in its early stage. However, illegal dumping often occurs in area where public notice doesn't reach. Illegal dumping in such area escapes from the surveillance of local governmental agents, then its scale tends to become larger. Satellite images can provide useful information to the agents for finding such the hidden illegal dumping since it can observe land surface conditions in extensive area from the above. The purpose of this study is to detect illegal dumping sites in an acquired satellite image by image analysis for supporting visual check by the agents. We attempt to develop a practical detection method that can be applied to more various kinds of illegal dumping sites. To realize this detection we conducted hearing investigations to the agents and on-site investigations. As a result of the investigations, it has been understood that information of vegetation removal and landscape structure change are useful for the detection. In this paper we proposed the detection method that uses mainly the information of vegetation removal and land surface structure change. In addition, application of the proposed method to actual images was examined.
