Detecting urbanization changes using SPOT5

An automatic system to estimate the urbanization changes on the Belgian territory, using SPOT5 images and the National Geographic Institute vectorial database is proposed. The images and the vectorial data are first co-registered. Then, the vectorial database is projected and dilated to produce a mask representing the old status of the database. On the other hand, a fusion of two classification processes on the images enables to extract the built-up area and the communication network, providing a mask representing the actual state of the urbanization in the zone. The comparison between the two masks gives a coarse information of the changes.