BACKGROUND: Household-level geographic information systems (GIS) database are usually constructed using the geographic positioning system (GPS). In some research settings, GPS receivers may fail to capture accurate readings due to structural barriers such as tall buildings. We faced this problem when constructing a household GIS database for research sites in Karachi, Pakistan because the sites...

This paper highlights the usefulness and accuracy of high-resolution satellite images in damage detection after the occurrence of natural disasters. A strong earthquake struck the city of Bam in the southeast Iran on 26 December, 2003 and it brought massive destruction to the city and its surrounding rural areas. IKONOS and QuickBird (QB), high-resolution optical satellites, captured clear imag...

The availability of metric or sub-metric satellite images like Ikonos or Quickbird has enabled the fast and automatic detection of man-made structures for applications such as risk or damage assessment and change detection. In particular, the use of stereo pairs reveals the third dimension so distinctive for buildings and responsible for artefacts like shadow and occlusions complicating traditi...

The focus of this study was to thoroughly exploit the capability of very high-resolution VHR satellite imagery such as Ikonos and QuickBird for disaster mitigation. An efficient automated methodology that detects damage was implemented to derive the rich information available from VHR satellite imagery. Consequently, the detected results and the VHR satellite imagery are attractively presented ...

Variable Endmember Constrained Least Square (VECLS) technique is proposed to account endmember variability in the linear mixture model by incorporating the variance for each class, the signals of which varies from pixel to pixel due to change in urban land cover (LC) structures. VECLS is first tested with a computer simulated three class endmember considering four bands having small, medium and...

S. Miguel Island's vascular plant flora (Archipelago of the Azores,Portugal) consists of approximately 1000 taxa and is largely dominated bynon-indigenous taxa. The rapid spread of some very aggressive invasivealien species, such as Pittosporum undulatum Vent. and Clethra arboreaAiton, is causing serious damages to this ecosystem. This paper assessedthe effectiveness of High...

Digital elevation model (DEM) extracted from IKONOS along-track stereo images with photogrammetric method is evaluated. As few as 12 GCPs are enough for the stereo photogrammetric bundle adjustment, which also filters the errors of the input data. With an area-based image matching users may produce high resolution DEMs with LE68 errors of 1 m to 4 m depending on the land covers. The best result...

Although passive remote sensing technology allows us to detect and map urban buildings and infrastructures, they have several limitations when it comes to extracting their heights. However, by using a combination of data from passive and active sensors, it is possible to overcome some of those limitations and produce highly accurate 3-D height maps of urban areas. In this paper, a combination o...