Mapping Urban Area Extents with Terrasar-x Single- Polarization Images

I – Introduction From the more structured urban areas in Europe and USA to the more chaotic Chinese, Asia’s and South America’s ones, from megalopolis to small and sparse settlements, the role of human settlements is becoming more and more important in land management, regional policy definition, and global modeling of environmental phenomena. The need for increased and more and more specific data sets led in the past to some examples of global urban extent data sets, but all of them have been extracted from optical or near infrared images [1-3]. This paper, stemming from project LAN008 approved after the TerraSAR-X AO, shows examples of urban area extents all over the world starting from VHR SAR images, allowing via a fast yet robust approach to provide in a quick way the global information needed by the above mentioned models, scientists and policy makers. So far, urban extent is the only reliable outcome of the process, but a few preliminary results of different and more refined land use mapping will be also presented in the result section.