Brent D. Ryan first visited Detroit in 1993. Describing this experience, he says: ‘‘The sense of emptiness was overpowering. ... I felt as if I was walking into the ruin of America.’’ In his book ‘‘Design after decline—how America rebuilds shrinking cities,’’ Ryan tries to understand why so many American cities have been losing population, what was and is done to change the fortune of these cit...

Space-borne SAR sensors are of special interest for mapping flood extent due to the possibility to acquire images in all weather conditions. In this article we review the SAR part of an operational flood mapping service. An operational service requires fully automatic methods that are able to process any available SAR data in near-real time. Mapping flood with SAR requires different approaches ...

.......................................................................................................................................... 3 WHAT IS LIDAR? ................................................................................................................................. 3 HYDROGRAPHIC LIDAR vs TOPOGRAPHIC LIDAR................................................................ 4 LID...

We address the problem of semantic mapping using mobile robots. We focus on the problem of mapping activity as a precursor to automatically classifying, modeling and ultimately understanding the usage of space in a typical urban outdoor environment. We propose and compare two methods for activity mapping one based on hidden Markov models and the other based on support vector machines. Both appr...

Participatory texture documentation (PTD) is a geospatial data collection process in which a group of users (dedicated individuals and/or general public) with camera-equipped mobile phones participate in collaborative collection of urban texture information. PTD enables inexpensive, scalable and high resolution data collection for urban texture mapping. In this paper, we introduce GeoSIM (Geosp...

The history of remote sensing and development of different sensors for environmental and natural resources mapping and data acquisition is reviewed and reported. Application examples in urban studies, hydrological modeling such as land-cover and floodplain mapping, fractional vegetation cover and impervious surface area mapping, surface energy flux and micro-topography correlation studies is di...

The Ball Aerospace Total SightTM Flash LiDAR and real time processing system provides real-time digital elevation map creation and dissemination. This unique capability is critical for mapping applications where data latency cannot be tolerated. These applications include rapid response disaster relief efforts, improved battlefield characterization and more timely and accurate military targetin...

The identification of built-up areas from aerial imagery is essential for map updating and detecting changes for a national mapping organisation. At the Chief Directorate of National Geospatial Information (CD: NGI), South Africa’s national mapping agency, this process relies on operators to manually digitise features of interest, which is very time consuming and labour intensive. It is therefo...

Studies that assess the distribution of benefits provided by ecosystem services across urban areas are increasingly common. Nevertheless, current knowledge of both the supply and demand sides of ecosystem services remains limited, leaving a gap in our understanding of balance between ecosystem service supply and demand that restricts our ability to assess and manage these services. The present ...

Participatory planning is a new paradigm in urban and community planning and a part of the future of the participation is on the Web. In this paper, new Web-based participation methods, along with their possibilities and challenges are studied. An urban planning experiment was carried out in the autumn 2007 in Pyhäjärvi, Finland. A Web mapping application was developed for the experiment to hel...