Abstract
Abstract. Urban areas in sub-Saharan Africa are growing at an unprecedented pace. Much of this growth is taking place in informal settlements. In South Africa more than 10% of the population live in urban informal settlements. South Africa has established a National Informal Settlement Development Programme (NUSP) to respond to these challenges. This programme is designed to support the National Department of Human Settlement (NDHS) in its implementation of the Upgrading Informal Settlements Programme (UISP) with the objective of eventually upgrading all informal settlements in the country. Currently, the NDHS does not have access to an updated national dataset captured at the same scale using source data that can be used to understand the status of informal settlements in the country. This pilot study is developing a fully automated workflow for the wall-to-wall processing of SPOT-5 satellite imagery of South Africa. The workflow includes an automatic image information extraction based on multiscale textural and morphological image features extraction. The advanced image feature compression and optimization together with innovative learning and classification techniques allow a processing of the SPOT-5 images using the Landsat-based National Land Cover (NLC) of South Africa from the year 2000 as low-resolution thematic reference layers as. The workflow was tested on 42 SPOT scenes based on a stratified sampling. The derived building information was validated against a visually interpreted building point data set and produced an accuracy of 97 per cent. Given this positive result, is planned to process the most recent wall-to-wall coverage as well as the archived imagery available since 2007 in the near future.
Highlights
According to the 2014 revision of the World Urbanization Prospects 54 per cent of the world’s population lives in urban areas and it will increase to 66 per cent by 2050 (UNDESA, 2014)
This paper demonstrated the potential of remote sensing to map the settlements of South Africa in an automated manner
The study proofed that the tools developed by the JRC for the Global Human Settlement Layer (Pesaresi et al, 2013) could be adapted to the South African context
Summary
According to the 2014 revision of the World Urbanization Prospects 54 per cent of the world’s population lives in urban areas and it will increase to 66 per cent by 2050 (UNDESA, 2014). Much of the expected urban growth will take place in countries of the developing regions, Africa As a result, these countries will face numerous challenges in meeting the needs of their growing urban populations, including for housing, infrastructure, transportation, energy and employment, as well as for basic services such as education and health care. In South Africa, the proportion of people living in urban areas increased from 52% in 1990 to 62% in 2011 Both cities and smaller towns are experiencing high growth rates in South Africa. In South Africa, about 1 249 777 households live in informal settlements excluding backyard shacks (STATSSA, Census 2011).
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
