Analytical tools to monitor urban areas

This chapter describes the development and implementation of a set of new analytical tools designed to extract various types of spatial information relevant to urban areas from digital, remotely-sensed images. These include techniques to infer land use and land use change from an examination of the spatial arrangement of land cover types in satellite sensor images, and a system to measure the height and volume of individual buildings from stereoscopic pairs of digitized aerial photographs. The latter can be used to derive three-dimensional CAD models of buildings for dynamic visualization of urban scenes or for direct input into existing GIS databases. -Authors