Innovators III SAR4URBAN

From the beginning of the years 2000, more than half of the global human population is living in urban environments and the trend of urbanisation is growing at an unprecedented speed. In emerging economies, the urban population is expected to double in 30 years (2000-2030), adding 2 billion more people, with particular focus in South Asia and Africa.

Monitoring urbanisation over time is nowadays a challenging and pressing issue that is of paramount importance especially in developing countries where often no related information is available. This is needed by urban planning agencies, civil protection authorities, energy suppliers, UN-Habitat, FAO, development and investment banks, insurance companies, etc.

Nevertheless, so far no methodology is yet available to effectively delineate the extent of urban areas in a completely unsupervised way and on an operational basis.

SAR4URBAN aims at overcoming these shortcomings by proposing an innovative approach that inherits the features of the technique previously developed for the Global Urban Footprint, the currently most detailed global layer depicting built-up and non-built-up areas at 12m spatial resolution derived from TerraSAR-X and TanDEM- X imagery. The methodology will be adapted to C-band SAR data from ERS-2, ENVISAT and Sentinel 1. Innovative methods will be developed to work at different scales on archived ERS SAR and ENVISAT ASAR data and to fully exploit the high-resolution and high frequency acquisition capabilities of Sentinel-1, hence preparing the ground for a large scale exploitation of both archived and new C-band SAR data.