Assessment of Spread Range of Urban Development in the West Delta by Utilizing High Resolution Satellite Images

The spread of urban development in the west delta and studying the factors of attraction and expulsion in the new cities and reclamation of desert land in Egypt becomes a hot issue nowadays. That is to solve the crisis of greater Cairo and central delta; this is in order to re-planning some new cities such as Sadat city that has been used as a study area in this paper. It was noticed that the population, in Sadat city, have abandoned it .Also, to consider the factors of shortfalls, both in services or in poor planning on the basis of the target population size in the original plan. In the light of these facts, some questions should be answered such as: i) how fast are such changes taking place? ii) What are the trends of such changes? In this regard, we used two quick bird (MS) satellite images with a high resolution which covering the years of 2004 and 2009. Three change detection methods were applied: i) Principle Component Analysis (PCA). ii) Minimum noise fraction. iii) Subtraction technique. Accuracy assessments were done for each class [urban and linear features (roads, canals)]. The obtained results are tabulated and analyzed.