What is Urban Area

Urbanization in Turkey and in the world continues is increased especially in the last 30 years. Therefore, urban areas having a dynamic structure should be regularly monitored and the urban region should be determined. There is a need of accurate current data that enables to monitor the temporally changing urban development and land use at regular intervals. In order to determine the urban sizes the 2010 DMSP - OLS (US Air Force Meteorological Satellite Program – operational line scan system) night-time images are used. This study is adapted to all provinces of Turkey. Night-time images in the literature are mainly used for examining the global economic and demographic differences between countries. In order to determine the urban growth from night-time images two different image analysis including object-based and cell-based methods are used in this study. Object-oriented image analysis method includes image segmentation studies and cell-based classification method contains natural breaks and otsu method.