Advances in urban information extraction from high-resolution remote sensing imagery

The study of urban area is one of the hottest research topics in the field of remote sensing. With the accumulation of high-resolution (HR) remote sensing data and emerging of new satellite sensors, HR observation of urban areas has become increasingly possible, which provides us with more elaborate urban information. However, the strong heterogeneity in the spectral and spatial domain of HR imagery brings great challenges to urban remote sensing. In recent years, numerous approaches were proposed to deal with HR image interpretation over complex urban scenes, including a series of features from low level to high level, as well as state-of-the-art methods depicting not only the urban extent, but also the intra-urban variations. In this paper, we aim to summarize the major advances in HR urban remote sensing from the aspects of feature representation and information extraction. Moreover, the future trends are discussed from the perspectives of methodology, urban structure and pattern characterization, big data challenge, and global mapping.