State-of-the-Art and Framework for Identifying Urban Patterns by Remote Sensing Data

Abstract

The increase in the spatial resolution of satellite imagery and the greater distribution of data have enabled the use of remote sensing for urban studies. However, there is still a lack of databases and cartographic publications for cities in the Brazilian Amazon. Thus, the following questions guided this work: what is the state-of-the-art in remote sensing to identify urban patterns in Brazil? Do these urban patterns equally cover all Brazilian regions? How to identify urban patterns in different contexts, such as the Amazon urban region? To this end, we conducted a review of publications that have identified urban patterns in Brazilian cities and put forward an identification model. For the most part, we observed that the works found analyzed small areas in São Paulo cities, using visual interpretation in private access and high spatial resolution imagery. To cover this gap, we propose a framework to identify Urban and Socio-Environmental Patterns based on remote sensing data, Voluntary Geographic Information data and census data. Although the framework can be applied in all regions of Brazil, the focus of the classification model is on Amazonian cities.