Producing a building change map for urban management purposes

Abstract

The high rate of changes in cities requires the existence of matching geographic information in order to allow a proper land monitoring and planning. The work presented in this paper is the exploration of very-high resolution (VHR) imagery as an alternative source of geospatial information for large scale mapping to assist municipal urban planning in Portugal. The goal is to produce an alarm system that indicates the location of potential changes in the building areas. This layer can be used by the municipal technicians as the basis for manual editing, following the technical specifications indicated for the 1:1 000 scale.