Urban change detection with satellite data : an example of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

Information about changes in urban areas are of great interest to city planners for prediction and planning future services.

Remote sensing technology has played a major role in the study and investigation of Earth's resources and the environmental conditions. The Landsat Multispectral Scanner-acquired data have been of great use in different applications in multidisciplinary experiments on a global scale. An important application of the Landsat data has been directed to the study of time-variant processes, such as detecting and monitoring changes in urban land-use.

The Landsat MSS images of 1973 and 1979 of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, were subjected to computer processing for detecting changes in urban development. Computer processing consisted of enhancing, registering and subtracting the two images to highlight the changes in urban development during that period.

The products of the computer processing were in the forms of thematic overlays, thematic maps, and qualitative and quantitative statistical measurements.

The result obtained from the study showed that digital processing systems and further quantitative geographical techniques can provide the means for periodic updating of information about land-use changes in the expansion of the urban area in the city of Riyadh.