High resolution analysis of settlement structure on base of topographic raster maps - Method and implementation

Abstract

The paper describes a method for full automatic calculation of settlement structure on base of simple topographic raster maps. In a first step extracted all buildings, they are mixed with streets, scripts and signatures in the maps. After vectorization we calculated building variables such as area, length, width, shape complexity and distance to next building. On base of this description we classified all buildings and realized a statistical analysis on building block level. We estimated 16 indicators (e. g. building and inhabitant density), visualized indicators in a GIS in optimized pre-defined legends and calculated a statistical report for the study area in different spatial resolution. The full automatic procedures called SettlementAnalyzer (SEMENTA®) have been implemented in ArcGIS under additional using of the image processing software HALCON. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.