Sustainable urban planning mapping using remote sensing and GIS in Malaysia

This study discusses the applicability of remote sensing and GIS techniques to classify urban land uses in Malaysia based on object-oriented classification, in order to extract the three components of urban areas, namely residential, commercial and industrial. The areas of interest in this study is Kuala Lumpur. The satellite data of SPOT 5 with fine spatial resolution of 2.5 meter and temporal resolution are tested. E-cognition software develops the rule sets of thematic layer attributes to extract the types of land use. The result shows that the three land use types are clearly identified, with low standard deviation of the classification. The variation is not too dispersed from the mean which proves that the result is acceptable. The findings also show that there have been some changes in the total acreage of recent classification due to the rapid development in the study area. Finally, the application of the object-oriented classification confirms the effectiveness of using remote sensing and GIS techniques in classifying urban land uses. This study also put forth some questions for future researches, which can help strengthen the potentials of remote sensing applications, especially in regards of further explorations of urban issues at various administration levels.