URBAN MONITORING AT A REGIONAL SCALE BASED ON MERIS AND ASAR DATA

摘要

Monitoring urban areas at a regional scale, and even at a global scale, has become an increasingly important topic in the last decades. New Earth Observation (EO) platforms provide remotely-sensed imagery that allows the monitoring of urban expansion with the required spatial and temporal resolutions. Currently, we can take advantage of the combination of sensors present in the ESA ENVISAT platform, which offers simultaneous acquisition of MERIS (MEdium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer) and ASAR (Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar) sensors. The aim of this work is to demonstrate the capabilities of MERIS and ASAR data to map urban areas at a regional scale. Since MERIS FR works with a 300 m pixel size, this application focuses on obtaining high accuracy at a regional scale, providing the basis for a low-cost highly automated pan-European service dedicated to identifying and monitoring urban areas, for instance, of EU25. For this purpose, a two-stage classification scheme based on an unsupervised approach is proposed, which allows us to introduce supervised information about the class of interest without an additional sample labelling.