Urban areas in sub-Saharan Africa are growing at an unprecedented pace. Much of this growth is taking place in informal
settlements. In South Africa more than 10% of the population live in urban informal settlements. South Africa has established a
National Informal Settlement Development Programme (NUSP) to respond to these challenges. This programme is designed to
support the National Department of Human Settlement (NDHS) in its implementation of the Upgrading Informal Settlements
Programme (UISP) with the objective of eventually upgrading all informal settlements in the country. Currently, the NDHS does not
have access to an updated national dataset captured at the same scale using source data that can be used to understand the status of
informal settlements in the country.
This pilot study is developing a fully automated workflow for the wall-to-wall processing of SPOT-5 satellite imagery of South
Africa. The workflow includes an automatic image information extraction based on multiscale textural and morphological image
features extraction. The advanced image feature compression and optimization together with innovative learning and classification
techniques allow a processing of the SPOT-5 images using the Landsat-based National Land Cover (NLC) of South Africa from the
year 2000 as low-resolution thematic reference layers as. The workflow was tested on 42 SPOT scenes based on a stratified
sampling. The derived building information was validated against a visually interpreted building point data set and produced an
accuracy of 97 per cent. Given this positive result, is planned to process the most recent wall-to-wall coverage as well as the archived
imagery available since 2007 in the near future.