Monitoring urban land use by Earth observation

This paper discuses the use of high resolution spaceborne Earth observation data in studies of the urban environment. Adopting a rigorous, mathematica l approach, it introduces the Spatial Re-classification Kernel (SPARK) algo rithm; this is applied to a suburban area in the south-east of London. It a lso introduces a region-based, structural pattern recognition approach to t he same problem through which urban land use might be inferred from an anal ysis of the morphological properties and structural relations of discrete l and cover regions identified in fine spatial resolution images.