Remote Sensing Urban Analysis

Satellite remote sensing is the process of collecting information about the Earth surface from the space through the measure of electromagnetic radiation. Nowadays, remote sensing is a mature technology used to extract, analyze, and detect changes of geographic and thematic information over large areas, inaccessible sites, or where only limited knowledge is available. In this chapter, we describe how satellite's data collected over Multan (Pakistan) have been used for mapping and monitoring the dynamics of the urban area. A multi-scale approach allowed to evaluate the urban growth of the municipality area occurred in the last 2 decades with medium-resolution Landsat-5/TM time series. Urban green plots and infrastructures (buildings and roads) have been mapped at the local scale of the historic Walled City with the state-of-the-art GeoEye-1 and WorldView-2 very high-resolution multispectral imagery.