Abstract:
Urban morphology is the phvsical appearance ofsocial reality. Aualvzing of urban
morphology is necessarvfor predicting the urban changes such as climatic change
and for understanding the urban processes such as urban sprawl 01110 agricultural
lands & wild habitats, and the expansion of residential land use at the urban
[ringe Earlier, aerial or field sutvevs lI'ere commonly used/or producing land use
//laps in order to understand the spatial structure of the cities. However. these
manual methods are more labor intensive. costlv and difficult to defect
morphological part ems over a long period of till/e. Thus this research attempted to
find out the feasibility of using nell' technologiesfor urban morphological aualvsis.
The technique adopted in this research 1ms Spectral Mixture Analysis (SA1A),
which is one 0/ the techniques in Remote Sensing technology. Two IKONOS
sate/lite images captured in ]005 covering Colombo district lI'ere used in this
research. The commercial image processing software. ENVI4.1 was used for data
analysis & visualization. This work evaluates the morphological characteristics 0/
Dehiwala-Mount Lavinia Municipality. using end-members that 1I'ere extracted
through Pixel Purity Index (PPI) , Scatter Plots & n-Dimensional visualizer. The
abundance maps 1I'ere generated for impervious surfaces, green vegetation, bare
soil & shade. Classification results [rom applying the SMA 11'ere assessed by
comparison with ground reference data.
The study identified tliat SMA technique classified the image with a high accuracv
gil'lllg 1I'ind011's to identify major land use types and urban morphology with a
considerable accuracy,
