What would be better for urban mapping in the Klang Valley? SPOT or Sentinel-1

Abstract

Klang Valley is undergoing rapid urbanization. Many cities in Klang Valley are developing to cope with the trend for migration to more urbanized areas. At the current pace and magnitude of urbanization, land expansion is one of the most visible, irreversible forms of land use and land cover change. Thus, Remote Sensing is regarded as an essential tool in these contexts that are important for urban studies and planning. In the past, many studies have relied on optical Remote Sensing rather than synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data. Some have argued that SAR is a poor choice because of its speckle noise and requires complex pre-processing, but countries in the tropics, where clouds are a big problem, cannot always rely on optical. The present work utilizes the interferometric coherence method with the C-band datasets acquired from the Sentinel-1 and compares it with the vegetation index method on the SPOT datasets for 2016 and 2021. Once adequately processed and classified, the SAR images resulted in significant textures on urban areas with respect to the map generated from vegetation index of SPOT images. Hence, these findings may prove beneficial in developing an effective urban planning strategy and policy formulation for the Klang Valley.