Population growth in rural areas of Egypt is rapidly transforming the landscape. New cities are appearing in desert areas while existing cities and villages within the Nile floodplain are growing and pushing agricultural areas into the desert. To enable control and planning of the urban transformation, these rapid changes need to be mapped with high precision and frequency. Urban detection in rural areas in optical remote sensing is problematic when urban structures are built using the same materials as their surroundings. To overcome this limitation, we propose a multi-temporal classification approach based on satellite data fusion and artificial neural networks. We applied the proposed methodology to data of the Egyptian regions of El-Minya and part of Asyut governorates collected from 1998 until 2015. The produced multi-temporal land cover maps capture the evolution of the area and improve the urban detection of the European Space Agency (ESA) Climate Change Initiative Sentinel-2 Prototype Land Cover 20 m map of Africa and the Global Human Settlements Layer from the Joint Research Center (JRC). The extension of urban and agricultural areas increased over 65 km² and 200 km², respectively, during the entire period, with an accelerated increase analysed during the last period (2010-2015). Finally, we identified the trends in urban population density as well as the relationship between farmed and built-up land. ... Read more

This work presents an automatic procedure to quantify dune dynamics on isolated barchan dunes exploiting Synthetic Aperture RADAR satellite data. We use C-band datasets, allowing the multi-temporal analysis of dune dynamics in two study areas, one located between the Western Sahara and Mauritania and the second one located in the South Rayan dune field in Egypt. Our method uses an adaptive parametric thresholding algorithm and common geospatial operations. A quantitative dune dynamics analysis is also performed. We have measured dune migration rates of 2–6 m/year in the NNW-SSE direction and 11–20 m/year NNE-SSW for the South Rayan and West-Sahara dune fields, respectively. To validate our results, we have manually tracked several dunes per study area using Google Earth imagery. Results from both automatic and manual approaches are consistent. Finally, we discuss the advantages and limitations of the approach presented. ... Read more

The Aswan High Dam, Egypt, was built in the 1960s and is one of the biggest dams in the world. It stopped the seasonal flood of Nile river allowing the urban expansion of cities/villages and the full year cultivation, producing 10×10 9 kWh of power annually. The dam is located in an area where several earthquakes (M L <;6) occurred from 1981 to 2007. In this paper, we want to identify any potential damage that could be caused to the dam, and assess its overall structural stability using Multi-Temporal InSAR (MT-InSAR). To reach this goal, we process Envisat data from descending orbits acquired between 2003 and 2010. Our initial estimates show relatively small rates (maximum around -3 mm/yr in the satellite Line-Of-Sight) of subsidence, whose implications must be further investigated. In addition, we perform a preliminary stress-strain analysis of the dam using FEL and FEM methods to assess if the detected movements correspond to the expected vertical behavior for such mega-structure. ... Read more

During the last decades, Greater Cairo, Egypt, is increasing in population and in built-up extension. Some of the new buildings are informal, constructed in absence of government planning processes, and threaten the Heritage Cultural Site of the Giza Pyramids. In addition, the fertile land of the Nile floodplain is being urbanized despite the government's building prohibition since the 1990s. Therefore, constant monitoring of construction activity is crucial in the rapidly changing environment of this area. Here, we present a data fusion approach that overcomes the limitations of single medium resolution sensor approaches, and also identifies areas in transition from desert to urban. We use multi-temporal multi-sensor supervised land use classification and include a new land use class for detecting undefined disturbances. Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data is combined with multi-spectral data for creating the land use land cover (LULC) maps using artificial neural networks (ANN). Specifically, ERS SAR data is combined with Landsat 5TM for 1998 and Envisat ASAR IMS with Landsat 7 ETM+ for 2004 and 2010. With this data fusion approach, it is measured an increase of 73% of Greater Cairo built-up extent from 1998 to 2010. Finally, we show the relationship between the aforementioned disturbances and the new built-up areas, detecting 26% of the total new built-up areas constructed from 1998 to 2010 where undefined disturbances were identified in previous land use maps. ... Read more

Before Arab Spring revolution, Greater Cairo had been the focus of urban growth studies due to its huge increase of population in the last decades, also using remote sensing satellites. Probably, the change in its urban extent may have been affected by the Arab Spring activity since it started in 2011, as it has been discussed by international organisations for which they are trying to get the answer to this phenomenon. This work uses the European Envisat and Sentinel-1A satellites as well as the American Landsat 7 and 8 for creating pre-revolution (2010) and post-revolution (2015) land use maps by combining the different SAR and Multi-Spectral (MS) sensors. By comparing the generated LUC maps, we identify the urban changes that occurred during the past 5 years, giving an answer to the question of the quantification of the urban increase in Greater Cairo. ... Read more

Greater Cairo is increasing in population and in built-up extension in the last decades. Monitoring of new construction works is crucial in this area, since some of the new buildings are threatening the Heritage Cultural Site of the Giza Pyramids. In addition, the fertile land of the Nile floodplain is also being urbanized, despite the government’s prohibition since the 1990s. By using optical and radar satellite remote sensing data it is possible to monitor the urban expansion. However, both single sensor approaches have problems in properly detecting urban features in the rapidly changing environment of Greater Cairo. The solution pointed us towards the integration of active and passive remote sensing datasets. Here we present a new method to detect not only more urban features than other medium resolution sensor approaches, but also construction areas in early stages. This is done by using multitemporal multi-sensor supervised land use classification and including a new land use class for detecting undefined anthropogenic disturbances (UAD). Our results also show the relationship between the detected UAD and the future built-up areas. The total urban extent had increased 81% since 1998 to 2010, and these new built-up areas where detected in both desert and floodplain. This information can be used for predicting the future extension of Greater Cairo. This abstract fits within the APLADYN project: a Belgian Science Policy project on anthropogenic and landscape dynamics in large fluvial systems. ... Read more

Detecting a point-like target when it is horizontally displaced is of paramount importance in target tracking and in measuring the motion of glaciers over short intervals of time. This paper performs an experimental study of the accuracy, precision and sensitivity of the horizontal motion detectable using SAR. Therefore point-like targets such as corner reflectors (CR) are moved horizontally in a controlled manner over short time intervals to reproduce the real target motion. Such CR movements are monitored using SAR and the results are compared with the ground truth to arrive at the target horizontal motion determination parameters. Towards this goal three CRs were installed each displaced by a few hundreds of metres in a farmland in Delft, The Netherlands. These corner reflectors are inclined for ERS-2 3-days ice-phase mission starting March 2011. Since the area does not exhibit horizontal motion, one of the CRs was moved horizontally stepwise in the order of a few centimeters to a few metres. At each step the CRs are imaged by SAR and also measured by campaign-style GPS (and with a few leveling campaigns) in order to provide the actual displacement in three dimensions. Then the motion is computed using SAR data and results are compared with the GPS measurements to validate the sensitivity of SAR in detection of motion of the targets. The experimental setup is such that the CRs are visible starting from March 2011 from both ascending and descending orbit TerraSAR-X satellite acquisitions over Delft. Hence similar parameters such as sensitivity, precision and accuracy of motion detection will be derived for X-band SAR as well. Further, in order to substantially verify the reliability of our computations, data from three different field experiments with stable CRs performed with ERS-1/2 in 1996, with ENVISAT from 2003 to 2007 and with ENVISAT from March 2010 to January 2011 in the areas of Groningen, Delft and Cabauw respectively were exploited. The outcome of our experiment will result in the empirical study of the sensitivity of motion detection of point-like targets in C- and X- bands. Also the influence of these parameters under varying imaging conditions such as change in Doppler and perpendicular baselines will be discussed. ... Read more

Persistent Scatterer Interferometry (PSI) has emerged over the last decade as a technique capable of very accurate (millimetric) measurements of ground deformation occurring at radar scatterers (persistent scatterers or PS) that are phase coherent over a period of time. PSI studies using C-band SAR data have shown that the PS spatial density in urban areas is usually very high (100-300 PS/km2). However, many ground deformation phenomena (e.g. tectonic motion, volcanoes, landslides, mining, gas extraction, CO2 sequestration) occur in uninhabited or rural areas with few man-made structures, leading to much lower PS density because of significant phase decorrelation between subsequent SAR acquisitions. In order for PSI to be effective in monitoring these areas, it has been found that a PS density greater than about 10 PS/km2 is required. Artificial amplitude- and phase-stable radar scatterers may thus have to be introduced in non-urbanised geodynamic areas that have too low a density of PS points. Conceptually the simplest of these artificial PS points are corner reflectors. Several experiments have been performed in the past using these reflectors, with conclusive results about their amplitude and phase stability. They suffer, however, from the disadvantage of large size (in the order of a metre in case of C-band SAR). To make these artificial PS points easy to deploy and maintain, especially in poorly accessible areas, Compact Active Transponders (CATs) have been designed to be used in lieu of corner reflectors. These CATs are small (in the order of a few tens of centimetres), lightweight (<3 kg), less obtrusive, and have the added advantage of a better link budget due to signal amplification by the transponder. They are sealed, function autonomously with internal power and over a wide temperature range, and can operate unattended for more than a year. Additionally, since a CAT is transmitter-specific and is only turned on at the time of the satellite overpass, it offers little interference to other radar or radio targets. However, it is of paramount importance in geodetic applications to ensure that the phase of the CAT remains stable in all operating and environmental conditions. Towards this goal, an experiment to validate the phase stability of CATs has been set up in a farmland in Delft (The Netherlands). The setup comprises three CATs and three corner reflectors, which are installed at distances of a couple of hundred metres from each other. SAR data from the ERS-2 Ice-Phase Mission are being acquired every three days between March and June 2011. Since the area does not exhibit steady ground deformation, some of the units are displaced vertically by a controlled amount. Levelling is performed between the CATs and the corner reflectors as close as possible to each SAR acquisition, in order to validate the height differences obtained from the radar phase information. As a second means of validation, campaign-style GPS is performed on each of the devices to accurately position them in WGS-84 coordinates. One of the CATs in the Delft field experiment has an integrated GPS antenna, to ensure millimetric coregistration and a coherent cross-reference. This novel unit called I2GPS (Integrated Interferometry and GNSS for Precision Survey) has been developed with the objective of producing a fully-integrated deformation map. In addition to providing absolute calibration for PSI data, the high temporal sampling rate of GPS data imparts the capability of accurately detecting abrupt ground motion in three dimensions. With adequate GPS/I2GPS units, the vertical components of the local velocity field can be derived from single-track InSAR line-of-sight displacements. The results and conclusions of this experiment consisting of corner reflectors, CATs and I2GPS will be presented and analysed here. ... Read more