Exploring the lateral expansion dynamics of four metropolitan cities of India using DMSP/OLS night time image

Large Indian urban agglomerations like Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata and Chennai are expanding rapidly beyond their territorial limits. But census of India, the only source of official data related to urbanization in India is not capable of capturing rapid urban dynamic due to some loopholes of Census of India. DMSP/OLS night time image become an alternative source of data for urban growth monitoring using its capability of capturing emitted lights from different sources. A threshold-based approach is applied to eliminate non-urban light capturing pixels. Based on the threshold values of 31 urban areas of four megacities of India for 1992, 2001, 2011are extracted. Threshold-based DMSP/OLS night time image extracted urban areas of four megacities shows a rapid increase of urban areas in an around the megacities. Chennai and Mumbai show a declining trend from 1992–2001 to 2001–2011 time span whereas Delhi and Kolkata shows an increasing trend of urban areas from the same time period. Out of the four Indian megacities, Chennai shows the fastest growing megacities for both of this two time span. It is also found that Chennai and Delhi shows an urban area increase abound 60% in the 2001–2011 time span. Analysis of this study identifies the applicability of threshold-based approach for measuring the rapid urban growth of a big city using DMSP/OLS night time image which opens a new avenue for the urban researchers. © 2017, Korean Spatial Information Society.