Feature and information extraction for regions of Southeast Europe from Corona satellite images acquired in 1968

Abstract

The Corona spy programme was a series of reconnaissance satellites which delivered more than 860000 images between 1960 and 1972. Since 1995, the data are declassified and a large historic earth observation archive is made accessible to the scientific community. Despite the large volume of information and the high spatial resolution of the satellite imagery, little has been done in the last 25 years in the context of image processing of this data source, a fact which perhaps can be attributed to the technical difficulties of these primitive images such as the lack of metadata, intense spatial and radiometric distortions, low Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) and a single panchromatic band. Hence, the photogrammetric challenges to extract useful information are paramount. In this study, we present recent developments arising from our efforts to map settlements and agricultural parcels over the Plovdiv region, Bulgaria from a Corona image acquired in 1968. We, overall, present initial findings from the integration of earth observation into the ERC-StG project UrbanOccupationsOETR and evaluate the usability of such primitive images in feature extraction. We compare the areas corresponding to settlements and correlate them with concurrent population census. Based on the findings, we suggest that settlements and agricultural parcels can be mapped from a Corona KH-4B image with fine radiometric quality.