A Supervised Approach to Delineate Built-Up Areas for Monitoring and Analysis of Settlements

Oliver Harig,Dirk Burghardt,Robert Hecht

doi:10.3390/ijgi5080137

Abstract

Monitoring urban growth and measuring urban sprawl is essential for improving urban planning and development. In this paper, we introduce a supervised approach for the delineation of urban areas using commonly available topographic data and commercial GIS software. The method uses a supervised parameter optimization approach along with buffer-based quality measuring method. The approach was developed, tested and evaluated in terms of possible usage in monitoring built-up areas in spatial science at a very fine-grained level. Results show that built-up area boundaries can be delineated automatically with higher quality compared to the settlement boundaries actually used. The approach has been applied to 166 settlement bodies in Germany. The study shows a very efficient way of extracting settlement boundaries from topographic data and maps and contributes to the quantification and monitoring of urban sprawl. Moreover, the findings from this study can potentially guide policy makers and urban planners from other countries.

Highlights

A sustainable handling of land is one of the guiding principles of spatial planning
The different processing variants are compared in terms of the achieved accuracies by computing different quality measures such as the introduced QBOM value, classification accuracy as well as precision and recall
We presented a supervised approach for the automatic delineation of settlement boundaries representing urban inner

Summary

Introduction

A sustainable handling of land is one of the guiding principles of spatial planning. Suburbanization leads to ongoing land take and associated urban sprawl. The negative side effects of urban sprawl are, for example, loss of valuable soils, higher infrastructure costs and traffic proliferation. Quantification, monitoring and evaluation of land-use changes including their impact is important in order to develop policy goals [1] and evaluate the impact of planning instruments [2]. In European countries, different quantitative targets for reducing land consumption are implemented [3]. Germany aims to reduce daily land take to 30 hectares per day, whereas Great Britain has set the target that 60% of new housing should be on brownfield land

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Discussion

Conclusion