Discovering urban functional zones by coupling remote sensing image and smart card data

Urban functional zone plays an important role in understanding complex urban systems. However, discovering urban functional zones is still challenging due to the complexity of urban systems. In recent years, the emergence of high spatial resolution (HSR) remote sensing image and human sensing data has provide favorable conditions for urban functional zone study. These two types of data have their own characteristics. Remote sensing images can describe the naturalphysical characteristics of ground elements; and human sensing data can describe the characteristics of human socioeconomic activities. Many researches have used either of them for urban studies, but few studies consider combining those two characteristics. In this paper, we propose to integrate HSR remote sensing image and smart card data of public transportation to analyze urban functional zones by combining the characteristics of ground elements and residents travel. The method was used to discover the urban functional zones of the Chaoyang district, Beijing, China. The result was compared with the results of the methods using HSR remote sensing image and smart card data separately. It demonstrated that our strategy is more effective.