scholarly journals Estimation of Building Heights and DEM Accuracy Assessment Using ICESat-2 Data Products

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 37
Author(s):  
Goddu Pavan Sai Goud ◽  
Ashutosh Bhardwaj

The use of remote sensing for urban monitoring is a very reliable and cost-effective method for studying urban expansion in horizontal and vertical dimensions. The advantage of multi-temporal spatial data and high data accuracy is useful in mapping urban vertical aspects like the compactness of urban areas, population expansion, and urban surface geometry. This study makes use of the ‘Ice, cloud, and land elevation satellite-2′ (ICESat-2) ATL 03 photon data for building height estimation using a sample of 30 buildings in three experimental sites. A comparison of computed heights with the heights of the respective buildings from google image and google earth pro was done to assess the accuracy and the result of 2.04 m RMSE was obtained. Another popularly used method by planners and policymakers to map the vertical dimension of urban terrain is the Digital Elevation Model (DEM). An assessment of the openly available DEM products—TanDEM-X and Cartosat-1 has been done over Urban and Rural areas. TanDEM-X is a German earth observation satellite that uses InSAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar Interferometry) technique to acquire DEM while Cartosat-1 is an optical stereo acquisition satellite launched by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) that uses photogrammetric techniques for DEM acquisition. Both the DEMs have been compared with ICESat-2 (ATL-08) Elevation data as the reference and the accuracy has been evaluated using Mean error (ME), Mean absolute error (MAE) and Root mean square error (RMSE). In the case of Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC), RMSE values 5.29 m and 7.48 m were noted for TanDEM-X 90 and CartoDEM V3 R1 respectively. While the second site of Bellampalli Mandal rural area observed 5.15 and 5.48 RMSE values for the same respectively. Therefore, it was concluded that TanDEM-X has better accuracy as compared to the CartoDEM V3 R1.

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 45
Author(s):  
Greyce Bernardes de Mello Rezende ◽  
Telma Lucia Bezerra Alves

The purpose of this article is to identify the areas of environmental vulnerability by flooding in urban areas of the municipalities of Barra dos Garças - MT, Pontal do Araguaia - MT and Aragarças - GO; and demarcate the occupations in permanent preservation areas (PPAs) in the study area. The methodology uses variables such as time series of maximum quotas of the Araguaia River, from 1968 to 2014, the frequency of those floods, as well as the local level curves. From the junction of these data, it was stipulated the levels of environmental vulnerability by floods in five levels: very high, high, medium, low and very low. The results indicate that areas with very high vulnerability correspond to approximately 1,58 square kilometers which equals to 0.5% of the total area studied; the high vulnerability areas, have only 3.19 square kilometers, corresponding to 1% of the area; the medium vulnerability areas have 7.66 square kilometers, which corresponds to 2.41% of the area; low vulnerability areas, have 11.18 square kilometers of extension relating to 3.52% of the area; and finally the remainder of the study area was characterized as very low vulnerability. After this mapping, it was found by satellite imaging from Google earth software dated 2014, the main occupations in PPAs. The main uses and occupations refer to human activities related to tourism, as well as commercial, residential and industrial buildings. It was found that it is of salutary importance that the Government enforces the fulfillment of the restrictions set out in the Forest Code, preventing that more occupations occur in PPAs and areas subject to flooding. Moreover, the mapping of areas of flooding is also a tool for future public policies that aim to guide the recommended areas to urban expansion, as well as ordering the use and occupation of land by developing zoning.


Transportation planning is an area of public policy that is increasingly recognized for having a significant impact on human health and well-being. Passengers all across the world are choosing bus transit as one of the most cost-effective ways of transportation. The number of passengers who use this mode of transportation is steadily increasing. According to statistics, the bus was India's most popular mode of transportation in 2014. A bus was viewed as a mode of transportation by 66 percent of families in rural areas and 62 percent of households in urban areas. With increased demand, there is a concern about efficiently organizing this service. Because a lack of planning can generate major problems in the real world, such as traffic jams and high operating expenses, it is a source of concern for corporate and government entities who provide this service. In this paper, a review on various bus transit planning approaches and stages and methodologies used in each stage of the customized bus planning strategy is presented. This study will assist bus service organizing entities, whether private or public, in efficiently organizing bus service


PEDIATRICS ◽  
1989 ◽  
Vol 83 (5) ◽  
pp. 876-877
Author(s):  
Herman Harris

The Comprehensive Sickle Cell Centers were established in 1972 to test, educate, counsel, and research sickle cell anemia and related hemoglobinopathies. Standards and protocols for testing, education, and research were readily established because similar procedures and methods were already in operation at the institutions where the centers were located. The most difficult and still the most controversial program to provide is counseling. It became evident, early, that there is no universally accepted method for informing carriers of abnormal Hb S about their results. Centers located in large urban areas with a limited testing radius do not face the same problems as centers located in rural areas where the testing radius may cover an entire state or several states. Individual, or one-on-one, counseling of persons with trait results appears to be successful for urban centers where the individual may be called to the center and given information. But, in a rural setting, it is not feasible for the center to ask a person to travel 350 miles to be told he or she has nothing to worry about. And it is not cost-effective to send a caseworker 350 miles to say the same thing. It must, therefore, be concluded that each agency or center must adopt counseling methods that meet its specific needs. Each program must be flexible, imaginative, and creative and must successfully and accurately deliver information about being a carrier for the sickle gene or other hemoglobinopathy and its implication and significance for patients and their future offspring. To do this, we must first look at the problems facing us.


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 204 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuying Lin ◽  
Xisheng Hu ◽  
Mingshui Lin ◽  
Rongzu Qiu ◽  
Jinguo Lin ◽  
...  

An in-depth analysis of urban road network distribution plays a critical role in understanding the urbanization process. However, effective ways to quantitatively analyze the spatial paradigms of road networks are still lacking, and few studies have utilized road networks to rapidly identify urban areas of a region. Thus, using a fast-developing region in the south-eastern costal region of China, Fuzhou City, as a case, we introduced kernel density estimation (KDE) to characterize road networks and quantified the area’s spatial heterogeneity using exploratory spatial data analysis (ESDA) and semivariance analysis (SA). The results show that there is an uneven spatial distribution of the networks both at the regional and downtown levels. At the regional level, there is a conspicuous polarization in the road distribution, with the KDE being much higher in the urban areas than in the rural areas; at the downtown level, the KDE gradually decreases from the center to the periphery. Quantitatively, the ranges of the spatial dependence of the networks are approximately 25 km for the entire study region and 12 km for the downtown area. Additionally, the spatial variations vary among different directions, with greater variations in the northeast–southwest and the southeast–northwest directions compared with the other directions, which is in line with the urban sprawl policy of the study area. Both the qualitative and quantitative results show that the distribution of road networks has a clear urban–rural dual structure, which indicates that road networks can be an active tool in identifying the urban areas of a region. To this end, we propose a quick and easy method to delimit urban areas using KDE. The extraction results of KDE are better than those of the index-based built-up index (IBI), indicating the effectivity and feasibility of our proposed method to identify the urban areas in the region. This research sheds new light on urbanization development research.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (11) ◽  
pp. 4643
Author(s):  
Pankaj Bajracharya ◽  
Salima Sultana

This paper examines and updates the rank-size distribution of cities and municipalities in Bangladesh between 1990 and 2019 based on two criteria: (1) built-up urban areas; and (2) population. The distribution of built-up urban areas and population are compared to provide a robust theoretical underpinning of Zipf’s law for future urban developmental planning framework. The data on built-up urban areas is extracted from land cover classification using Google Earth Engine and the population data is obtained from the decennial censuses. The comparison of the conformity to Zipf’s law indicated contradictory results. While a greater proportion of the population has been increasingly concentrated in the smaller and midsized cities over the last three decades, built-up urban areas, on the other hand, have been mostly clustered in two largest cities— Dhaka and Chittagong—accounting for 50 to nearly 60 percent of the total built-up urban areas. These results shed light on the magnitude of continued spatial inequalities in urban development amongst cities and municipalities in Bangladesh despite there being an overall increase of evenness in the distribution of population over time. These results imply an unsustainable rate of urban expansion in Bangladesh and reinforce the need for the exploration of policies and regulations targeted at guiding the rate and direction of evenness in urban expansion.


2018 ◽  
Vol 41 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 12-24
Author(s):  
Dipak Bahadur Adhikari

Informal sector plays a crucial role in employing a significant part of the economically active population of Nepal. The Nepal Labour Force Survey(NLFS) - 2017/18 has estimated around 62 percent of people to be currently employed in the informal sector. It is estimated that there are 84.6 percent of the currently employed who are informally employed in all industries as compare to formal employment 15.4 percent in Nepal. Employment is the main source of income of poor people which is still considered to be the most effective vehicle to take them out of poverty. People of rural areas are gradually coming to urban areas. So, economic growth and structural changes are increasingly linked to urbanization process. More people will live in urban settlements than in rural areas. Metropolitan cities of Nepal like Lalitpur can offer the lure of better employment, education, and healthcare and they also contribute disproportionately to the economy of the country. However, rapid urban expansion is often associated with poverty and rapid growth of informal sector urban area.


Author(s):  
Anant R. Koppar ◽  
Venugopalachar Sridhar

Healthcare Delivery Systems are becoming overloaded in developing countries like India and China. It is imperative that more efficient and cost effective processes are employed. One such requirement is the automatic detection of malaria parasites in stained blood smears. Malaria is a mosquito-borne infectious disease. Each year Malaria kills between one and three million people. The most conventional and gold standard test for the confirmation of the Malarial diagnosis is the peripheral blood smear examination. The paper investigates and develops an automated malaria diagnostic system based on the color image processing using Hue, Saturation & Intensity (HSI) model. The algorithm is designed to identify only parasites inside red blood cells (erythrocytes) to avoid false positive results. The work-flow process has enabled practical tele-pathology by allowing e-collaboration between lesser skilled technicians in rural areas and experts in urban areas, cutting down the total turnaround time for diagnosing malaria from days to minutes.


Author(s):  
Sarat Dass ◽  
Romano Ngui ◽  
Balvinder Singh Gill ◽  
Yoke Fun Chan ◽  
Wan Yusoff Wan Sulaiman ◽  
...  

Abstract Background We studied the spatiotemporal spread of a chikungunya virus (CHIKV) outbreak in Sarawak state, Malaysia, during 2009–2010. Methods The residential addresses of 3054 notified CHIKV cases in 2009–2010 were georeferenced onto a base map of Sarawak with spatial data of rivers and roads using R software. The spatiotemporal spread was determined and clusters were detected using the space-time scan statistic with SaTScan. Results Overall CHIKV incidence was 127 per 100 000 population (range, 0–1125 within districts). The average speed of spread was 70.1 km/wk, with a peak of 228 cases/wk and the basic reproduction number (R0) was 3.1. The highest age-specific incidence rate was 228 per 100 000 in adults aged 50–54 y. Significantly more cases (79.4%) lived in rural areas compared with the general population (46.2%, p<0.0001). Five CHIKV clusters were detected. Likely spread was mostly by road, but a fifth of rural cases were spread by river travel. Conclusions CHIKV initially spread quickly in rural areas mainly via roads, with lesser involvement of urban areas. Delayed spread occurred via river networks to more isolated areas in the rural interior. Understanding the patterns and timings of arboviral outbreak spread may allow targeted vector control measures at key transport hubs or in large transport vehicles.


2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 733-750 ◽  
Author(s):  
Spyridon Spyratos ◽  
Demetris Stathakis

Statistics about citizen satisfaction regarding urban facilities and services are required for governing urban areas. Such statistics are often unavailable or outdated. At times, existing statistics are irrelevant to the major problems of most citizens. In this article, we propose a cost-effective method for estimating citizen satisfaction regarding urban facilities and services using crowdsourced place data. Two indicators are proposed based on place data derived from the Foursquare social media application. Both indicators are based on the hypothesis that the higher the number of places is that belong to a facility or service type on social media, then the higher the satisfaction of citizens regarding this facility or service type will be. This hypothesis was tested by using the Eurobarometer survey data as reference. The accuracy assessment revealed strong and statistically significant linear relationships ([Formula: see text]) between the reference percentage of very satisfied citizens and some categories (i.e. “ Sport facilities”, “ Cultural Categories,” and “S treets & buildings”). Other categories showed moderate and statistically significant linear relationships (i.e. “ Public spaces” and “ Green spaces”). Therefore, the proposed indicators provide estimates about citizen satisfaction with regard to these five categories. The new indicators can be used to better design public opinion surveys by making them more relevant to the public in terms of topics, space, and time.


2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (01) ◽  
pp. 282-308
Author(s):  
Rogério Augusto Figueiredo Coutinho ◽  
Antônio Dimas Cardoso ◽  
Simone Narciso Lessa

O ordenamento e planejamento territorial dos municípios vêm sofrendo intensas e profundas mudanças, seja pela imposição das forças produtivas e do capital, ou ainda pela necessidade de se adotar novos arranjos territoriais que atendam determinadas necessidades e particularidades locais, trazendo na sua esteira transformações de ordem socioeconômicas e ambientais, levando a vários tipos de investimento em planejamento com abordagens diferenciadas. O último processo de planejamento da Região Metropolitana de Belo Horizonte, qual seja, o Plano Diretor de Desenvolvimento Integrado da Região Metropolitana de Belo Horizonte (PDDI-RMBH, 2009/2011), e o seu respectivo Macrozoneamento (MZ-RMBH, 2014), apontaram para a evidenciação da ocorrência de alguns processos socioespaciais desencadeados a partir de ações governamentais estruturantes, como é o caso do município de Confins, que já alterou toda sua legislação específica para estabelecer que o perímetro urbano, tal como definido no Plano Diretor vigente (Lei Complementar nº 012/2009), corresponde à totalidade das divisas municipais. Transformou, pois, todas as áreas/zonas rurais em áreas/zonas urbanas ou de expansão urbana. Buscou-se com esse estudo entender em que medida esse processo realizado em Confins foi derivado de disputas entre os vários interesses implicados na formação e no planejamento da Metropolitana de Belo Horizonte. A justificativa do trabalho consistiu na importância de, por meio do estudo e análise dos efeitos desse processo de territorialização do município de Confins, jogar luz sobre o papel do Aeroporto (AITN), da pressão imposta pela implantação da Cidade Administrativa e do Vetor Norte, desembocando, em tese, na supressão dos espaços rurais, e, via de consequência, na produção dos correlatos espaços urbanos. Palavras-chave: metrópole, lugar, território, aeroporto, Confins, região metropolitana.   (TRANS)TRAINING OF THE MUNICIPALITY OF CONFINS AND ITS TERRITORIAL PLANNING ABSTRACT The planning and territorial planning of municipalities are undergoing intense and profound changes, either by the imposition of productive forces and capital, or by the need to adopt new territorial arrangements that meet certain local needs and particularities, bringing in its wake socioeconomic transformations And environmental, leading to various types of planning investment with differentiated approaches. The last planning process of the Metropolitan Region of Belo Horizonte, namely the Integrated Development Master Plan of the Metropolitan Region of Belo Horizonte (PDDI-RMBH, 2009/2011), and its respective Macrozoneamento (MZ-RMBH), pointed to The evidence of the occurrence of some socio-spatial processes triggered by structural governmental actions, as is the case of the municipality of Confins, which has already changed all its specific legislation to establish that the urban perimeter, as defined in the current Master Plan (Complementary Law No. 012 / 2009), corresponds to the totality of the municipal currencies. It has thus transformed all rural areas / areas into urban areas or areas of urban expansion. This study sought to understand to what extent this process carried out in Confins was derived from disputes between the various interests involved in the formation and planning of the Metropolitana de Belo Horizonte. The justification of this work was the importance of studying the effects of this process of territorialization in the city of Confins, to shed light on the role of the Airport (AITN), the pressure imposed by the implementation of the Administrative City and the North Vector, Leading to the suppression of rural spaces, and consequently, in the production of related urban spaces. Keywords: metropolis, place, territory, airport, Confins, metropolitan region.   (TRANS)FORMACIÓN DEL MUNICIPIO DE CONFINS Y SU PLANIFICACIÓN TERRITORIAL RESUMEN El ordenamiento y planificación territorial de los municipios vienen sufriendo intensos y profundos cambios, sea por la imposición de las fuerzas productivas y del capital, o por la necesidad de adoptar nuevos arreglos territoriales que atiendan determinadas necesidades y particularidades locales, trayendo en su estera transformaciones de orden socioeconómicas y ambientales, llevando a varios tipos de inversión en planificación con enfoques diferenciados. El último proceso de planificación de la Región Metropolitana de Belo Horizonte, es decir, el Plan Director de Desarrollo Integrado de la Región Metropolitana de Belo Horizonte (PDDI-RMBH, 2009/2011), y su respectivo Macrozoneamiento (MZ-RMBH, 2014), se ha señalado para la evidencia de la ocurrencia de algunos procesos socioespaciales desencadenados a partir de acciones gubernamentales estructurantes, como es el caso del municipio de Confins, que ya alteró toda su legislación específica para establecer que el perímetro urbano, tal como se define en el Plan Director vigente (Ley Complementar nº 012/2009), corresponde a la totalidad de las divisas municipales. Transformó, pues, todas las áreas / zonas rurales en áreas / zonas urbanas o de expansión urbana. Se buscó con ese estudio entender en qué medida ese proceso realizado en Confins fue derivado de disputas entre los diversos intereses implicados en la formación y en la planificación de la Metropolitana de Belo Horizonte. La justificación del trabajo consistió en la importancia de, a través del estudio y análisis de los efectos de ese proceso de territorialización del municipio de Confins, arrojar luz sobre el papel del Aeropuerto (AITN), de la presión impuesta por la implantación de la Ciudad Administrativa y del Vector Norte, desembocando, en tesis, en la supresión de los espacios rurales, y, por consiguiente, en la producción de los correlatos espacios urbanos. Palabras clave: metrópoli, lugar, territorio, aeropuerto, Confins, región metropolitana.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document