Cities and villages in Egypt are subjected to rapid growth. Growth can
be beneficial economically, but it also has significant effects on the
environment, and if it is left unchecked can have negative impacts. Rapid
population increase led to replace agriculture land by buildings, roads
and highways. The changes are in particularly harmful when urban
expansion occurs against surrounding agricultural areas. So the
expansion of cities and villages must be monitored. Recent developments
in remote sensing enable us to use high resolution satellite images for
different purposes. One of the main application fields for remotely
sensed data is the large-scale topographic mapping and map revisions,
for which it is necessary to detect and extract features from such
imagery. The high resolution space images available now from IKONOS
and Quick Bird do have a resolution which is partially in competition to
aerial images. This paper presents an evaluation of using IKONOS
satellite images for large scale mapping purpose. This evaluation has
two elements, the first is geometric potential and the second is the
information contents. The results of this study show that correcting
IKONOS imagery using one or two Ground Control Points (GCPs) gives
about 1.6m horizontal accuracy, higher accuracy can be obtained using
more GCPs. The feature extraction is performed by manual on screen
digitizing. The results are verified against a 1:25000 topographic map,
features such as roads and canals can be extracted with about 70-99%
accuracy.