夜间灯光遥感与城市问题研究:数据, 方法, 应用和展望

Nighttime light remote sensing is a unique optical remote sensing technology that can record ground object radiation information at night that cannot be obtained by daytime remote sensing. Given that artificial light in urban areas is the main source of stable nighttime light, nighttime light remote sensing images have been proven to reflect the variation in human activities at night. At the same time, they have extensive coverage, are time intensive and readily available, and have widely been a proxy for urban studies on the multi-scale or long-term analysis. The application related to the nighttime light data is growing at present. However, most reviews have focused on the preprocessing and potential application of nighttime light data, and the summary of nighttime light data in urban studies is still limited. In this study, we reviewed nighttime light-related research in three aspects: multi-scale analysis of the urban spatial structure, multi-scale estimation of urban socio-economic indicators, and research in urban public security. Three challenges, namely, the application of nighttime light data with a short time interval, the generation of longer nighttime light time series, and the quantitative validation, are also discussed to explore the potential applications in the future.