Green Areas and Shadow Inside Cities

Green areas and shadowed regions are important spaces, significantly influencing the well-being of citizens. The amount of vegetation describes the suitability of areas for recreational purposes and serves as major carbon sink. Areas covered by shadow can particularly contribute to light deficiency. Especially shadows being cast from tall buildings in narrow urban canyons can create regions without direct sunlight throughout the year. Thus, both features affect the health -positively and negatively- of people in urban environments. Corresponding statistics acquired by the usage of remote sensing data are relevant for city planners as well as retailers and other stake holders.

Automated Mapping of Green Areas and Shadow Inside Cities

For every aerial imaging service provider, detailed city mapping based on high-resolution imagery may become a very tedious task if image analytics are not highly automated. Tama Group now offers a structured methodology for aerial imagery service providers to increase the level of automation for city mapping projects. The methodology centers on automated extraction of green areas and shadowed areas.

We used for example high resolution airborne orthophotos and a digital surface model of the city Bremen, Germany, to extract green areas and shadowed regions in combination with a building mask. In this example we concentrate on three different study sites, urban, industrial, and rural, characterized by dissimilar amounts of vegetation and impervious surfaces as well as different building types.

Versatility of Methodologies

The whole process chain is designed for very fast performance, classification accuracies still range from 95 up to 99%. All the layers created may be mixed and matched with GIS data and other thematic layers. The versatility of this methodologies allows for many different use cases, both for aerial imaging service providers as well as consumers of the information extracted. All steps introduced are fully automated and can be adapted for large scale batch processing.

More  detailles  information you will find in our Media Centre under ‘AppNotes’.

Let’s talk which kind of information is essential for your city at this point and in the future.