Land use feature extraction and sprawl development prediction from quickbird satellite imagery using Dempster-Shafer and land transformation model

Accurate knowledge of land use/land cover (LULC) features and their relative changes over upon the time are essential for sustainable urban management. Urban sprawl growth has been always also a worldwide concern that needs to carefully monitor particularly in a developing country where unplanned building constriction has been expanding at a high rate. Recently, remotely sensed imageries with a very high spatial/spectral resolution and state of the art machine learning approaches sent the urban classification and growth monitoring to a higher level. In this research, we classified the Quickbird satellite imagery by object-based image analysis of Dempster-Shafer (OBIA-DS) for the years of 2002 and 2015 at Karbala-Iraq. The real LULC changes including, residential sprawl expansion, amongst these years, were identified via change detection procedure. In accordance with extracted features of LULC and detected trend of urban pattern, the future LULC dynamic was simulated by using land transformation model (LTM) in geospatial information system (GIS) platform. Both classification and prediction stages were successfully validated using ground control points (GCPs) through accuracy assessment metric of Kappa coefficient that indicated 0.87 and 0.91 for 2002 and 2015 classification as well as 0.79 for prediction part. Detail results revealed a substantial growth in building over fifteen years that mostly replaced by agriculture and orchard field. The prediction scenario of LULC sprawl development for 2030 revealed a substantial decline in green and agriculture land as well as an extensive increment in build-up area especially at the countryside of the city without following the residential pattern standard. The proposed method helps urban decision-makers to identify the detail temporal-spatial growth pattern of highly populated cities like Karbala. Additionally, the results of this study can be considered as a probable future map in order to design enough future social services and amenities for the local inhabitants.