Vera DeWit

Over the last several decades, cities in America’s Rust Belt region have experienced population and economic declines – most notably, the City of Detroit. With increased property vacancies, many residential structures are abandoned and left vulnerable to degradation. In many cases, one of the answers is to demolish the structure, leaving a physical, permanent change to the urban fabric. The following study uses freely available very high-resolution (VHR) aerial ortho photographs to perform a remote sensing analysis through the application of Geographic Object Based Image Analysis (GEOBIA) methods. The research successfully generates the distinction between pervious and impervious land cover, and links those to parcel lot administrative boundaries within the City of Detroit. Additionally, it explores potential challenges and solutions for batch classification when performing change detection analysis using different sensors at varying spatial resolutions in diverse areas within the city.