Grid Services and Satellite Image Processing for Urban and River Bed Changes Assessment

Satellite images can provide huge amounts of data that in principle could be processed and provide very useful information in many areas. Grid based architectures might be suitable platforms for their digital processing and analysis because they offer the required computational power to process satellite data in real time. Here, we describe several Grid Services which implement some of the satellite images processing and analysis techniques used to detect urban growth and river bed changes. Thus, we have implemented a supervised image classification algorithm which marks out the urban or river bed areas, and a comparison image algorithm, which compares two classified images, taken in 1970 and 2000, and highlights the urban or river bed changes.