Spatiotemporal analysis and image registration for studying growth of transportation infrastructure in Sharjah City, UAE

Abstract

Sharjah is the third largest and populous city in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). It is located along the northern coast of the Persian Gulf on the Arabian Peninsula. Throughout the past few decades, Sharjah City has witnessed massive growth in its urban area and infrastructure facilities. Transportation infrastructure, in particular, is a key indicator of growth and development of the city. Transportation is a vital component of the economy and prosperity of any city as it provides easy access to land, moves large volumes of people and vehicles, enables larger markets, and saves time and costs. Recent advances in satellite imagery, in terms of improved spatial and temporal resolutions, are allowing for efficient identification of change patterns and the prediction of areas of growth. This paper aims to quantify and analyze the spatial-temporal relationship between urban growth and the transportation development that took place at Sharjah City from 1976 until 2014. For growth detection and quantification, linear features extracted automatically from multi-temporal Landsat registered images were adopted as the basis of change detection where pixel-to-pixel subtraction has been implemented. Linear features were also chosen for image registration since they can be reliably extracted from imagery with significantly different geometric and radiometric properties. Digitized features of building and roads have been used as ground-truth of the adopted algorithm. Preliminary results show that the range of growth represented by linear features (building and roads) that occurred during the 1976-2014 period accounts for about 33% of the total area inside Sharjah City.