UrbSense - Multi-sensor monitoring of the urban environment: potential of the combined use of hyperspectral, thermal and LiDAR sensing technologies for characterization of urban green and the built environment.
Although remote sensing is an interesting source for characterising the physical properties of the urban environment, in terms of hydrological or urban heat flux modelling the level of differentiation in functional land cover properties delivered by conventional remote sensing approaches is rather coarse and does not allow a clear parameterisation of pixel components in terms of their biophysical behaviour (e.g. level of permeability, thermal properties). This EUFAR project will explore the potential of the combined use of hyperspectral, thermal and LiDAR sensing technologies for detailed characterization of urban green and the built environment. Specifically it will focus on evaluating the added value of data fusion approaches in solving pending issues such as: *the limitations of current approaches to address problems related to spatial ambiguity and similarity between materials and disturbing effects of illumination and viewing geometry *the optimisation of spectral unmixing techniques for detailed biophysical characterisation of urban areas, and the transferability of these approaches to coarser resolutions.