Improved extraction of urban extents from ASAR Wide Swath data

It has been already proved that ASAR Wide Swath Mode data can be used to extract human settlement extents at the global level with a consistent quality all over the world. To improve this performance, a different and more refined approach has been designed and tested. The improved procedure involves the knowledge about the amount of scenes that are combined for the input ASAR WSM data to the procedure, as well as additional checks on coastal areas and arid environments. It is shown that the improved procedure provides better results by comparison with existing urban extents for major cities mainland China, aggregated at the province level.