Regional urban extent extraction using multi-sensor data and decision rules

In this study, a new method of extracting urban extents using relation among statistical features and decision rules was developed. Results indicate that the data from different years produced the same decision rules. The experimental results also demonstrate that the method can achieve better results than the global threshold method. A main advantage of the proposed method is that the rules derived from data of a specific year can be transferred to the data of other years, which makes it promising for rapidly monitoring urban areas regionally using DMSP/OLS NTL time series data. However, the proposed method needs further validation using more data in different geographical regions.