Scaling up to National/Regional Urban Extent Mapping Using Landsat Data

This paper describes a methodology to extract a consistent human settlement extent layer using Landsat data and its implementation in the Google Earth Engine platform. The approach allows the extraction of human settlement extents by means of the existing Landsat 5 and 7 data sets, allowing to check their evolution at 30-m spatial resolution. Since human settlements are the main proxy to people geographical distribution and to building locations, this layer may serve as a mean to disaggregate people/building counts at the regional/national level. The approach is tested in several parts of the world against existing ground truth data at the same spatial resolution in Brazil and China, as well as against extents manually extracted from VHR data in three different geographical areas: 1) Brazil; 2) South East China; and 3) Indonesia.