Identification and characterization of urban structures using VHR SAR data

The global process of urbanization is associated with various ecological, social and economic changes in both the built-up area and the adjacent natural or cultivated landscape. To manage the effects and impacts of this development, effective urban and regional planning requires accurate and up to date information on the urban dynamics. This paper introduces a methodology to automatically detect human settlements and then further characterize the identified built up areas in terms of the building density based on VHR SAR data. The SAR imagery is acquired by the German satellite system TerraSAR-X. Regarding the delineation of the built-up area in the region of Munich we achieved an overall accuracy of 94 % and a Kappa of 0.86. The estimation of building density showed a coefficient of determination (r
²
) of up to 0.74. The mean absolute error of the modeled building densities was 5%.