Remote Sensing of Urban Areas

Lecturer

Hannes Taubenböck
Henri Dubray

ECTS

5 ECTS

 

Aim

Aim of this course is to provide you with an overview on geographic processes of urbanization, the related demographic and structural changes of cities, and data analyses methods using remote sensing data for applications in urban geography.

Content

Humankind is within its largest migration ever: from rural areas into cities. The drivers of this global process of urbanization from demographic to economic and the related  structural changes cities are facing will be discussed in this course. Remote sensing is one crucial data source in this dynamic transformation and its products are highly relevant for urban planning, as well as environmental management. Within this course different approaches and techniques are covered focusing on deriving relevant information about urbanized areas on different levels of detail. Uni-temporal-, multi-temporal-, and time series based image classification, segmentation, the analyses of point patterns, GIS analyses to assess spatial context and dependencies, as well as analyses in the 3D domain will be addressed in this course. This will be done providing and discussing example applications from different regions globally (e.g. urban sprawl analysis of megacities, the development of new dimensions of urban landscapes such as mega-regions, the rearrangement of business districts within the urban landscape, etc.). You will learn what capabilities Earth observation data, methods and products have for urban research and applications and how to design remote sensing based urban analysis, how to avoid caveats, troubleshoot errors and interpret the results.

General Course News and Updates

thesis idea presentations

thesis idea presentations

On Monday 26th of July at 2pm we will have two MSc thesis idea presentations:   Jakob Wachter (thesis idea):"Derivation of Snow cover in mountain regions from Webcam and Sentinel Imagery (thesis idea)" - supervisors Dr. Tobias Ullmann and Dr. Mattia Rossi, EURAC...

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MSc Defense by Sandro Groth

MSc Defense by Sandro Groth

Sandro Groth will present his M.Sc. thesis "Using street-level imagery and multi-task deep learning for multi-hazard risk related building characterization" on June 28th at 9am. From his abstract: "Accurate building characterization is a key component of multi-hazard...

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MSc defense by Henrik Fisser

MSc defense by Henrik Fisser

Henrik Fisser will present his M.Sc. thesis on Thursday 17th of June at 9am about “Sentinel-2-based moving truck detection for spatiotemporal road cargo emission and density approximation”. More details from his abstract: "In many countries freight is mainly...

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MSc defense of Basil Tufail

MSc defense of Basil Tufail

Basil Tufail will present his M.Sc. thesis "Monitoring the Displacement of an Active Tailings Dam in Peru using Persistent Scatterer Interferometry (PS-InSAR)" on Friday, June 18th, at 9am. From the abstract: "As mining activities and the number of tailings dam grow...

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Review of applications

Review of applications

Dear all applicants in 2021, we are currently working through the first evaluation of all 230 applications and will send out invitations for interviews in the next days/weeks. Unfortunately we are a bit delayed due to the high number of applications and we want to...

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MSc thesis defense by Johannes Mast

MSc thesis defense by Johannes Mast

Johannes Mast will present his thesis "Analyzing the relationship between urban morphology and economic subcenters with a focus on urban polycentricity using remote sensing and socioeconomic data" on Monday 14th of June at 9am. From the abstract: "Polycentricity...

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