Temporal Autocorrelation of Sentinel-1 SAR Imagery for Detecting Settlement Expansion

Urban areas are rapidly expanding globally. The detection of settlement expansion can, however, be challenging due to the rapid rate of expansion, especially for informal settlements. This paper presents a solution in the form of an unsupervised autocorrelation-based approach. Temporal autocorrelation function (ACF) values derived from hyper-temporal Sentinel-1 imagery were calculated for all time lags using VV backscatter values. Various thresholds were applied to these ACF values in order to create urban change maps. Two different orbital combinations were tested over four informal settlement areas in South Africa. Promising results were achieved in the two of the study areas with mean normalized Matthews Correlation Coefficients (MCCn) of 0.79 and 0.78. A lower performance was obtained in the remaining two areas (mean MCCn of 0.61 and 0.65) due to unfavorable building orientations and low building densities. The first results also indicate that the most stable and optimal ACF-based threshold of 95 was achieved when using images from both relative orbits, thereby incorporating more incidence angles. The results demonstrate the capacity of ACF-based methods for detecting settlement expansion. Practically, this ACF-based method could be used to reduce the time and labor costs of detecting and mapping newly built settlements in developing regions.