Urban Remote Sensing: methods, sensors and applications

It is estimated that today more than half of the world’s population lives in urban agglomeration, characterized by a diversity of uses and land cover: they comprise buildings (residential, commercial, industrial, or institutional), infrastructure systems, and open spaces, vegetated or not. As complex systems, cities are transformed by social, ecological, and technological interaction. In this context, Urban Remote Sensing encompasses different themes, such as mapping of urban extension and growth, of impervious surfaces or vegetation, of areas of informal or illegal occupation, or of areas at risk of natural disasters, which must be addressed with increasingly accurate two- and threedimensional data and information. New developments in the field of Urban Remote Sensing use data from orbital satellites of high and very high spatial resolution, sub-orbital and terrestrial sensors, automatic and semi-automatic methods of image analysis, and classification based on machine learning and deep learning, with the possibility of using cloud computing. This thematic session aims to present the state of the art in Urban Remote Sensing, discussing recent advances in techniques, methods, technologies, and applications related to the analysis and visualization of urban landscapes.