Solutions

There is a growing demand for environmentally friendly storm water management practices. Relatively recent federal mandates, outlined in the Clean Water Act (1999) and enforced through the EPA’s National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES), compel states to adopt comprehensive municipal storm water management rules by 2003! Because impervious surface maps are an essential input layer to all storm water analysis models, methods for accurately mapping and measuring the extent and quantity of impervious surfaces are of critical importance.

Using high resolution remote sensing data such as IKONOS data makes it possible in principle to detect man-made features such as buildings and roads. However, due to the high spatial resolution of the IKONOS data, an automatic or semi-automatic detection of such features based only on their spectral entities can be difficult, especially in heterogeneous situations such as dense urban areas. Using a DEM and additional semantic information helps to detect them more adequately.

Feature-extraction software eases change detection High-resolution satellite imagery has been a boon for airport mapping applications, allowing analysts to identify runways, taxiways, buildings, roads, rivers and other relevant features. Such applications are made even more effective with imagecontent analysis software.