SUMMARY
This study describes the use of multitemporal principal component analysis (MPCA) and vegetation index differencing (VIDN) techniques in identifying open area on post-coal mining sites using multi spatial and multidate of Landsat TM and SPOT 4 XS imageries. The study revealed that the synthetic images derived from stable brightness, stable greenness,s and delta brightness of MPCA summarize information on post-coal-mining opened areas provided overall accuracy of 76.47% for the new ex mining area and 32.69% for old ex mining area. The VIDN method provided relatively lower accuracy than those from MPCA i.e. 58.87% for new ex mining and 13.25% for old ex-mining areas. The study also concluded that identifying open area on post-coal-mining sites using imageries was more efficient than using only ground survey, providing cost efficiency of 29%. Thisindicates that the cost required using satellite image is only 29% of the cost required for ground survey. The study concluded that MPCA is better than VIDN for identifying open area on post-coal-mining sites.