Multitemporal analysis in Google Earth Engine for detecting urban changes using optical data and machine learning algorithms

The aim of this work is to perform a multitemporal analysis using the Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform for the detection of changes in urban areas using optical data and machine learning (ML) algorithms. As a case study, Cairo City has been identified, in Egypt country, as one of the five most populous megacities of the last decade in the world. Classification and change detection analysis of the region of interest (ROI) have been carried out from July 2013 to July 2021 to monitor urban growth. Results demonstrate the validity of the proposed method in identifying changed and unchanged urban areas over the selected period. Furthermore, this work aims to evidence the growing significance of GEE as an efficient cloud-based solution for managing large quantities of satellite data. The code has been made open source and the repository for the paper is available on our GitHub page.