Urbanization is one of the most widespread anthropogenic causes of the loss of arable land, habitat destruction (Alphan, 2003), and the decline in natural vegetation cover. One of the major reasons of urbanization is rapid population growth in the urban area. Apparently, the urban population has grown exponentially and by 2011, for the first time in human history, more people in the world will be living in cities and towns than in rural areas. Furthermore, by 2017 the developing world is likely to have become more urban in character than rural, therefore, the vast majority of urban growth is now occurring in the developing world (UN-Habitat, 2003).
Digital change detection is the process of determining and/or describing changes in land- cover and land-use properties based on co-registered multi-temporal remote sensing data. Numerous researchers have addressed the problem of accurately monitoring land-cover and land-use change in a wide Variety of environment. Remote sensing and GIS are now providing new tools for advanced ecosystem management.
One of the objectives of the study was to generate a spatial GIS database for the study area and to understand the urbanization process in the past 2-3 decades. Secondly and most importantly the main objective of this study is to quantify the sprawl of urbanization. Therefore, the built- up area was extracted and used to assess the urbanization.