Small format digital imaging for informal settlement mapping

Recent advances in technology and wider commercial applications have promoted the remote sensing and airborne mapping communities to take a closer look at digital imaging and its advantages over conventional film-based, large-format aerial photography, In this paper, we focus on the potential of high-resolution, digital color imagery acquired from an airborne smoll-format digital camera for rapid mapping of complex urban informal settlements. We discuss the example of automated building extraction using a novel color edge extractor developed with similarity-based color morphology and report on investigations into the use of this low-cost digital imaging option for rapid spatial data acquisition of informal settlements under dynamic conditions. Results from our work suggest that the approach taking advantage of color information to generate attributed edges to hypothesize shack roof outlines by exploiting the fuzzy similarity measure and color morphology is a potential new avenue to automatically extract buildings from high-resolution color digital imagery.