SAR-Based Urban Extents Extraction: From ENVISAT to Sentinel-1

Abstract

There are only a few examples in technical literature about the use of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) dataset to extract human settlement extents. This paper shows how it is possible to extract a global urban layer from multiyear ENVISAT Advanced SAR (ASAR) backscatter measurements, overcoming some of the drawbacks of a preliminary release. Additionally, this research shows that the same technique can be applied with minor changes to SAR data from the new Sentinel-1A platform. The current ASAR urban layer shows improvements with respect to the preliminary version in the test sites of the 2011 Round Robin (RR) on urban mapping promoted by the European Space Agency (ESA). For Sentinel-1, results are similarly validated on the test sites of the 2015 edition of the RR on urban mapping. Results prove that UEXT can be used for SAR-based urban extent extraction using multiple sensors.