SAR for large scale urbanisation mapping

The SAR4URBAN project developed an innovative approach to automatically extract built-up areas from the joint use of C-band SAR and multi-spectral optical data. The novelty of the method has been the integration of temporal statistics from SAR and optical data into large-scale urban mapping with fully automatic extraction of training samples, machine learning classification and post-classification enhancement. The main output of the SAR4URBAN project has been the World Settlement Footprint (WSF) 2015, the first global map of human settlements generated globally from the joint processing of optical and radar imagery. The WSF 2015 is available at 10m spatial resolution with a global coverage (in urban, peri-urban and rural areas) and is based on the processing of all Sentinel-1 and Landsat-8 imagery acquired in 2014 and 2015.