Abstract: A new method is proposed for automated recognzing the change types of residential areas using topological relations between new and old boundaries of residential areas.The residential areas samples on new rectified images are selected by existed boundary of residential areas on old maps.In order to obtain correct ranges of residential areas on the new rectified images,a two-step algorithm is applied.The first step is to do initial extraction of residential areas based on Law's Temples.The second step is to adjust the initial results using Grain table.To recognize the six change types of residential areas,the topology relations of new boundary on the rectified images and old boundary on the existed maps are analyzed by a 4-intersection model.The experimental results show that the proposed method using topology relations can automatically identify the change types of residential areas and provide more accurate change information.