Monitoring Urban Land Use by Earth Observation

This paper discuses the use of high resolution spaceborne Earth observation data in studies of the urban environment. Adopting a rigorous, mathematical approach, it introduces the Spatial Re-classification Kernel (SPARK) algorithm; this is appliedto a suburban area in the south-east of London. It also introduces a region-based, structural pattern recognition approach to the same problem through which urban land use might be inferred from an analysis of the morphological properties and structural relations of discrete land cover regions identified in fine spatial resolution images.