Study and Analysis of WorldView-­‐2 satellite Imagery for evaluating the energy efficiency of the urban area of Kalamaria, Greece

Energy use is one of the most important issues nowadays due to its serious impacts on the environment, on the decrement of natural resources, and finally on the quality of our lives. What it is becoming increasingly evident is the importance of sustainable energy planning for every country and every community. Energy analysts have traditionally focused on energy policy efforts for buildings and equipment to apply demand-side management measures that lower energy consumption or balance demand more efficiently. Today, analysts are closely examining the role of urban infrastructure and urban land use patterns to better determine energy consumption levels. The interconnection and interaction of urban forms and land-use with energy efficiency is the key issue in this study. The case study concerns the city of Kalamaria, Greece. In 2011, the Greek government started an effort to compute the status of energy balance of buildings for a number of Greek cities. The goal in this study is to provide useful information that helps and improves this energy planning process with the use of the 8-band multispectral Worldview image. In specific, this study aims at defining the land uses inside the city (e.g. green areas, built-up, road networks) by classifying the multispectral image with object-oriented techniques and subsequently at extracting building information (e.g. roof types) with feature extraction techniques. The further analysis of the results leads to a specific grouping of roofing materials with various reflectivity and absorption factors, thus providing information about the buildings’ energy behaviour

Τhis paper was originally published in South-Eastern European Journal of Earth Observation and Geomatics, ISSN 2241-1224, Vol1, No1, pp 41-54, 2012

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