Where We Live—A Summary of the Achievements and Planned Evolution of the Global Urban Footprint
2018
The TerraSAR-X (TSX) mission provides a distinguished collection of high resolution satellite images that shows great promise for a global monitoring of
human settlements. Hence, the German Aerospace Center (DLR) has developed the Urban
FootprintProcessor (UFP) that represents an operational framework for the mapping of
built-up areasbased on a mass processing and analysis of TSX imagery. The UFP includes functionalities for data management, feature extraction, unsupervised classification, mosaicking, and post-editing. Based on >180.000 TSX StripMap scenes, the UFP was used in 2016 to derive a
global mapof human presence on Earth in a so far unique spatial resolution of 12 m per grid cell: the Global Urban
Footprint(GUF). This work provides a comprehensive summary of the major achievements related to the Global Urban
Footprintinitiative, with dedicated sections focusing on aspects such as UFP methodology, basic product characteristics (specification, accuracy, global figures on urbanization derived from GUF), the user community, and the already initiated future roadmap of follow-on activities and products. The active community of >250 institutions already working with the GUF data documents the relevance and suitability of the GUF initiative and the underlying high-resolution SAR imagery with respect to the provision of key information on the human presence on earth and the global
human settlementsproperties and patterns, respectively.
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