Cloud-based solution for urbanization monitoring using satellite images

Motivated by the large amount of available satellite data and increasing interest in the study of urbanization, this paper presents a way for better supervision of urbanization, as more and more people are looking to increase their quality of life by migrating to urban areas. This project is particularly useful for environmental researchers or citizens who are looking to make informed decisions. This project utilizes Sentinel Hub, a multi-spectral satellite imagery cloud service, to access Sentinel 2 data to detect changes in Romania’s urban environment automatically. Sentinel Hub’s spectral bands, which describe the reflectance properties of a surface, are used to compute spectral indices that highlight patterns in satellite images. The paper analyzes two urban indices that successfully map build-up regions and a vegetation index that assesses the degree of vegetation in an urbanized area. It employs different methods to enhance each index and evaluates its performance in a town that has seen rapid urban expansion.