High Precision Monitoring of Urban Sealing

From 1997 until 2000 the daily increase of built-up areas in Germany was 129 ha while the German population remained constant. According to national policy, this land consumption rate shall be reduced to 30 ha per day until 2020. In this context the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) of Germany initiated the support program “REFINA” (Research for the reduction of land consumption and sustainable surface management). One of the funded research projects is the “development and trial of semi-automatic and automated methods for surveying and assessing settlement and traffic areas using remote sensing”.

This project is coordinated by EFTAS Fernerkundung Technologietransfer in cooperation with the University of applied science of Osnabrück, the municipality of Osnabrück and the “Landesamt für Bergbau, Energie und Geologie” of the german state of Lower Saxony.

The Research objectives in this project focussed on the Development of semi-automatic
methods for a faster and cheaper integration of image information into the urban planning process. Test sites in the city of Osnabrück (Northern Germany) have been selected in close cooperation with all relevant stakeholders (Department of city planning of Osnabrück, Department of urban green of Osnabrück, environmental protection agencies of the urban and state government).

Embedded tasks of the project are:
· Area-wide survey and preparation of actual and historical image information
· Analysis of the usability of new satellite sensor- and camera systemsfor high precision monitoring
· Analysis of Historical area development by multi-temporal analysis from 1935 until 2005
· Image pre-processing
· object class definition in cooperation with stakeholders
· Development of object-oriented classification methods and methods for pattern matching
· Evaluation of the classification- and pattern matching results

The results of the project underline the suitability of remote sensing techniques to support city planning processes.