Comparison of built-up area maps produced within the global human settlement framework

摘要

The validation of built-up areas derived from different sensors is crucial for gaining a deeper understanding of the consistency and interoperability between them. This article presents the methodology and results of an inter-sensor comparison of built-up area data derived from Landsat, Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2, and SPOT5/SPOT6. The assessment was performed for 13 cities across the world for which cartographic reference building footprints were available. Several validation approaches were used: cumulative built-up curve analysis, pixel-by-pixel performance metrics, and regression analysis. The results indicate that Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 contribute greatly to improved built-up area detection compared to Landsat, within the global human settlement framework. However, Sentinel-2 tends to show high omission errors while Landsat tends to have the lowest omission error. The built-up area obtained from SPOT5/SPOT6 shows high consistency with the reference data for all European cities, and hence can potentially be considered as a reference dataset for wall-to-wall validation in Europe.