Use of multitemporal spot HRV‐PAN images for mapping urban expansion processes

Abstract

The use of satellite remote sensing for operationally assessing urban land cover changes is generally constrained by the limited spatial resolution of the image series which cover sufficiently long time periods. Only SPOT HRV‐Panchromatic (PAN) images have in fact a sufficient spatial resolution (10 × 10 m) and are now available for more than 12 years. In most cases, however, the utility of these data for land cover change assessment has been limited by their poor spectral information content. A new multi‐step methodology is currently developed to extract the information related to urban land cover changes from SPOT HRV‐PAN multitemporal images. The methodology is divided in two main phases. During the first phase (change assessment) directional Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is applied to each SPOT HRV‐PAN image pair in order to identify the areas where change had occurred. The second phase (change interpretation) is performed by applying the following steps: Multi‐scale extraction of textural inform...