From land cover-graphs to urban structure types

Abstract

Urban structure types (UST) are an initial interest and basic instrument for monitoring, controlling and modeling tasks of urban planners and decision makers during ongoing urbanization processes. This study focuses on a method to classify UST from land cover (LC) objects, which were derived from high resolution satellite images. The topology of urban LC objects is analyzed by implementing neighborhood LC-graphs. Various graph measures are examined by their potential to distinguish between different UST, using the machine learning classifier random forest. Additionally the influence of different parameter settings of the random forest model, the reduction of training samples, and the graph measure importance is analyzed. An independent test set is classified and validated, achieving an overall accuracy of 87%. It was found that the height of the building with the highest node degree has a strong impact on the classification result.

Keywords:

• urban structure types
• adjacency-graphs
• land cover
• land use
• urban

Acknowledgments

This work was financed by the ProExzellenz initiative of the Thüringer Ministerium für Bildung, Wissenschaft und Kultur (TMBWK), grant no. PE309–2 and is part of the Thuringian Graduate School of Image Processing and Image Interpretation. We want to express our thanks to the land registry offices of Rostock for the provision of the DLM and LiDAR data. We also want to thank the thorough review and the constructive comments of the anonymous reviewers, which were instrumental in improving this paper.