Tile mapping of urban area extent in VHR SAR images

At the high resolutions attainable with the new generation space-borne sensors, the focus moves increasingly from spectral characteristics to geometric features. This trend is even more evident for urban areas which tend to show an unpaired concentration of linear features with respect to any other land cover. This naturally applies to both optical and radar images, and suggests one may use local concentration of linear features to gauge the presence of urban structures. In this paper we exploit a linear feature extractor to map the extent of urban areas in very high resolution optical and SAR images.