Human settlements from Landsat data using Google Earth Engine

This paper describes a methodology to extract a consistent human settlement extent layer using Landsat data and its implementation in the Google Earth Engine platform. The approach allows the extraction of the human extents by means of the existing Landsat 5 and 7 data sets, allowing a multitemporal analysis of the evolution of human settlements at 30 m spatial resolution. Since human settlements are the main proxy to people geographical distribution, this layer may serve as a mean to disaggregate people counts in multiple time instants, with a consistent accuracy along more than 20 years. The approach is tested against available global data sets and existing ground truth data at the same spatial resolution, as well as with extents manually extracted from VHR data for large urban areas in Brazil.