ANALYSIS OF URBAN SPRAWL PHENOMENON IN BATNA CITY (ALGERIA) BY REMOTE SENSING TECHNIQUE

Define Batna city, define its outlines and follow the spatio-temporal evolution is one of the complex problems. Urban sprawl, that rapid urbanization is the occupancy factor of soil changes, generally irreversible. His study in a medium-sized city is an important issue that requires monitoring and detailed analysis. Our approach includes the use of remotely sensed images to evaluate and qualify urban sprawl in Batna. For this purpose, we used a series of images in digital format for the years 1972, 1987, 2001 and 2013, acquired by multispectral sensors mounted on Landsat satellite platforms, for area which is the subject of experimentation, then supervised classification by Support Vector Machine (Radio Basis Function classifier RBFC) was utilized. The selection of the images available from Landsat archives was made so that their acquisition date is spread enough to better distinguish changes within the urban fabric. The results obtained confirm that urban area increased 173.32% between 1972 -1987, 55.62% between 1987 -2001 and 38.71% between 2001 -2013. Furthermore, Shannon’s entropy index shows that the city has a high level of sprawl along its urban expansion history