Deep-learning coupled with novel classification method to classify the urban environment of the developing world
The University of Tokyo(东京大学);The Independent University Bangladesh(孟加拉国独立大学);The Data and Design Lab(数据与设计实验室);University of Dhaka(达卡大学);United Nations University(联合国大学)
Qianwei Cheng, AKM Mahbubur Rahman, Anis Sarker, Abu Bakar Siddik Nayem, Ovi Paul, Amin Ahsan Ali, M Ashraful Amin, Ryosuke Shibasaki, Moinul Zaber
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Accepted paper at 2nd International Conference on Signal Processing and Machine Learning (SIGML 2021); 20 pages, 7 figures, 1 table
Rapid globalization and the interdependence of humanity that engender tremendous in-flow of human migration towards the urban spaces. With advent of high definition satellite images, high resolution data, computational methods such as deep neural network, capable hardware; urban planning is seeing a paradigm shift. Legacy data on urban environments are now being complemented with high-volume, high-frequency data. In this paper we propose a novel classification method that is readily usable for machine analysis and show applicability of the methodology on a developing world setting. The state-of-the-art is mostly dominated by classification of building structures, building types etc. and largely represents the developed world which are insufficient for developing countries such as Bangladesh where the surrounding is crucial for the classification. Moreover, the traditional methods propose small-scale classifications, which give limited information with poor scalability and are slow to compute. We categorize the urban area in terms of informal and formal spaces taking the surroundings into account. 50 km x 50 km Google Earth image of Dhaka, Bangladesh was visually annotated and categorized by an expert. The classification is based broadly on two dimensions: urbanization and the architectural form of urban environment. Consequently, the urban space is divided into four classes: 1) highly informal; 2) moderately informal; 3) moderately formal; and 4) highly formal areas. In total 16 sub-classes were identified. For semantic segmentation, Google's DeeplabV3+ model was used which increases the field of view of the filters to incorporate larger context. Image encompassing 70% of the urban space was used for training and the remaining 30% was used for testing and validation. The model is able to segment with 75% accuracy and 60% Mean IoU.
University of Waterloo(滑铁卢大学);Chinese Academy of Sciences(中国科学院);Jimei University(集美大学)
Semantic segmentation of large-scale outdoor point clouds is essential for urban scene understanding in various applications, especially autonomous driving and urban high-definition (HD) mapping. With rapid developments of mobile laser scanning (MLS) systems, massive point clouds are available for scene understanding, but publicly accessible large-scale labeled datasets, which are essential for developing learning-based methods, are still limited. This paper introduces Toronto-3D, a large-scale urban outdoor point cloud dataset acquired by a MLS system in Toronto, Canada for semantic segmentat…
Delft University of Technology(代尔夫特理工大学);CycloMedia Technology(CycloMedia科技公司)
We introduce a novel deep learning-based framework to interpret 3D urban scenes represented as textured meshes. Based on the observation that object boundaries typically align with the boundaries of planar regions, our framework achieves semantic segmentation in two steps: planarity-sensible over-segmentation followed by semantic classification. The over-segmentation step generates an initial set of mesh segments that capture the planar and non-planar regions of urban scenes. In the subsequent classification step, we construct a graph that encodes the geometric and photometric features of the …
Biases can filter into AI technology without our knowledge. Oftentimes, seminal deep learning networks champion increased accuracy above all else. In this paper, we attempt to alleviate biases encountered by semantic segmentation models in urban driving scenes, via an iteratively trained unlearning algorithm. Convolutional neural networks have been shown to rely on colour and texture rather than geometry. This raises issues when safety-critical applications, such as self-driving cars, encounter images with covariate shift at test time - induced by variations such as lighting changes or seasona…
In recent years, using a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) as a feature encoder (or backbone) is the most commonly observed architectural pattern in several computer vision methods, and semantic segmentation is no exception. The two major drawbacks of this architectural pattern are: (i) the networks often fail to capture small classes such as wall, fence, pole, traffic light, traffic sign, and bicycle, which are crucial for autonomous vehicles to make accurate decisions. (ii) due to the arbitrarily increasing depth, the networks require massive labeled data and additional regularization …
The research performs urban ecosystem analysis supported by ENVI GIS by integrated studies on land cover types and geospatial modeling of Taipei city. The paper deals with the role of anthropogenic pressure on the structure of the landscape and change of land cover types. Methods included assessment of the impact from anthropogenic activities on the natural ecosystems, evaluation of the rate and scale of landscape dynamics using remote sensing data and GIS. The research aims to assist environmentalists and city planners to evaluate strategies for specific objectives of urban development in Tai…
Automated tracking of urban development in areas where construction information is not available became possible with recent advancements in machine learning and remote sensing. Unfortunately, these solutions perform best on high-resolution imagery, which is expensive to acquire and infrequently available, making it difficult to scale over long time spans and across large geographies. In this work, we propose a pipeline that leverages a single high-resolution image and a time series of publicly available low-resolution images to generate accurate high-resolution time series for object tracking…
Two out of three people will be living in urban areas by 2050, as projected by the United Nations, emphasizing the need for sustainable urban development and monitoring. Common urban footprint data provide high-resolution city extents but lack essential information on the distribution, pattern, and characteristics. The Local Climate Zone (LCZ) offers an efficient and standardized framework that can delineate the internal structure and characteristics of urban areas. Global-scale LCZ mapping has been explored, but are limited by low accuracy, variable labeling quality, or domain adaptation chal…
There is a prevailing trend to study urban morphology quantitatively thanks to the growing accessibility to various forms of spatial big data, increasing computing power, and use cases benefiting from such information. The methods developed up to now measure urban morphology with numerical indices describing density, proportion, and mixture, but they do not directly represent morphological features from the human's visual and intuitive perspective. We take the first step to bridge the gap by proposing a deep learning-based technique to automatically classify road networks into four classes on …
BMD-45: A Large-Scale CCTV Vehicle Detection Dataset for Urban Traffic in Developing Cities
Department of Computational and Data Sciences (CDS)(计算与数据科学系);Robert Bosch Center for Cyber Physical Systems (RBCCPS)(罗伯特·博世中心(RBCCPS));Center of Data for Public Good (CDPG)(公共数据中心(CDPG));Centre for Infrastructure, Sustainable Transportation & Urban Planning (CiSTUP)(基础设施、可持续交通与城市规划中心(CiSTUP));Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, India(印度科学研究院,班加罗尔,印度)
Guangdong Key Laboratory for Urbanization and Geo-simulation, Sun Yat-sen University(中山大学广东省城市化与地理模拟重点实验室)
With the rapid progress of China's urbanization, research on the automatic detection of land-use patterns in Chinese cities is of substantial importance. Deep learning is an effective method to extract image features. To take advantage of the deep-learning method in detecting urban land-use patterns, we applied a transfer-learning-based remote-sensing image approach to extract and classify features. Using the Google Tensorflow framework, a powerful convolution neural network (CNN) library was created. First, the transferred model was previously trained on ImageNet, one of the largest object-im…
Technical University of Denmark(丹麦技术大学);Otovo AS(Otovo公司)
The body of research on classification of solar panel arrays from aerial imagery is increasing, yet there are still not many public benchmark datasets. This paper introduces two novel benchmark datasets for classifying and localizing solar panel arrays in Denmark: A human annotated dataset for classification and segmentation, as well as a classification dataset acquired using self-reported data from the Danish national building registry. We explore the performance of prior works on the new benchmark dataset, and present results after fine-tuning models using a similar approach as recent works.…
Urbanization is a common phenomenon in developing countries and it poses serious challenges when not managed effectively. Lack of proper planning and management may cause the encroachment of urban fabrics into reserved or special regions which in turn can lead to an unsustainable increase in population. Ineffective management and planning generally leads to depreciated standard of living, where physical hazards like traffic accidents and disease vector breeding become prevalent. In order to support urban planners and policy makers in effective planning and accurate decision making, we investig…
Friedrich Schiller University of Jena(耶拿弗里德里希·席勒大学)
Classifying single image patches is important in many different applications, such as road detection or scene understanding. In this paper, we present convolutional patch networks, which are convolutional networks learned to distinguish different image patches and which can be used for pixel-wise labeling. We also show how to incorporate spatial information of the patch as an input to the network, which allows for learning spatial priors for certain categories jointly with an appearance model. In particular, we focus on road detection and urban scene understanding, two application areas where …
Urban planning applications (energy audits, investment, etc.) require an understanding of built infrastructure and its environment, i.e., both low-level, physical features (amount of vegetation, building area and geometry etc.), as well as higher-level concepts such as land use classes (which encode expert understanding of socio-economic end uses). This kind of data is expensive and labor-intensive to obtain, which limits its availability (particularly in developing countries). We analyze patterns in land use in urban neighborhoods using large-scale satellite imagery data (which is available w…
Sun Yat-sen University(中山大学);Wuhan University(武汉大学)
Impervious surface area is a direct consequence of the urbanization, which also plays an important role in urban planning and environmental management. With the rapidly technical development of remote sensing, monitoring urban impervious surface via high spatial resolution (HSR) images has attracted unprecedented attention recently. Traditional multi-classes models are inefficient for impervious surface extraction because it requires labeling all needed and unneeded classes that occur in the image exhaustively. Therefore, we need to find a reliable one-class model to classify one specific land…
In countries experiencing unprecedented waves of urbanization, there is a need for rapid and high quality urban street design. Our study presents a novel deep learning powered approach, DeepStreet (DS), for automatic street network generation that can be applied to the urban street design with local characteristics. DS is driven by a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) that enables the interpolation of streets based on the areas of immediate vicinity. Specifically, the CNN is firstly trained to detect, recognize and capture the local features as well as the patterns of the existing street netwo…
Jackson School of Geosciences(杰克逊地球科学学院);University of Texas at Austin(德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校);CIRES, University of Colorado Boulder(科罗拉多大学博尔德分校环境科学研究合作研究所);NOAA/Physical Sciences Laboratory(美国国家海洋和大气管理局物理科学实验室);Purdue University(普渡大学);Cockrell School of Engineering(科克雷尔工程学院)
Urban downscaling is a link to transfer the knowledge from coarser climate information to city scale assessments. These high-resolution assessments need multiyear climatology of past data and future projections, which are complex and computationally expensive to generate using traditional numerical weather prediction models. The city of Austin, Texas, USA has seen tremendous growth in the past decade. Systematic planning for the future requires the availability of fine resolution city-scale datasets. In this study, we demonstrate a novel approach generating a general purpose operator using dee…
More than half of the world's roads lack adequate street addressing systems. Lack of addresses is even more visible in daily lives of people in developing countries. We would like to object to the assumption that having an address is a luxury, by proposing a generative address design that maps the world in accordance with streets. The addressing scheme is designed considering several traditional street addressing methodologies employed in the urban development scenarios around the world. Our algorithm applies deep learning to extract roads from satellite images, converts the road pixel confide…
Northeastern University(东北大学);University Space Research Association(大学空间研究协会);NASA Ames Research Center(美国国家航空航天局艾姆斯研究中心);University of Massachusetts, Amherst(马萨诸塞大学阿默斯特分校);University of British Columbia(不列颠哥伦比亚大学);Imperial College London(帝国理工学院)
Urban air pollution is a public health challenge in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). However, LMICs lack adequate air quality (AQ) monitoring infrastructure. A persistent challenge has been our inability to estimate AQ accurately in LMIC cities, which hinders emergency preparedness and risk mitigation. Deep learning-based models that map satellite imagery to AQ can be built for high-income countries (HICs) with adequate ground data. Here we demonstrate that a scalable approach that adapts deep transfer learning on satellite imagery for AQ can extract meaningful estimates and insights …
Universidade Tecnológica Federal do Paraná - UTFPR(巴拉那联邦技术大学);University of Toronto(多伦多大学)
Opinion mining in outdoor images posted by users during different activities can provide valuable information to better understand urban areas. In this regard, we propose a framework to classify the sentiment of outdoor images shared by users on social networks. We compare the performance of state-of-the-art ConvNet architectures, and one specifically designed for sentiment analysis. We also evaluate how the merging of deep features and semantic information derived from the scene attributes can improve classification and cross-dataset generalization performance. The evaluation explores a novel…
Technical University of Munich (TUM)(慕尼黑工业大学);German Aerospace Center (DLR)(德国航空航天中心)
Land-use classification based on spaceborne or aerial remote sensing images has been extensively studied over the past decades. Such classification is usually a patch-wise or pixel-wise labeling over the whole image. But for many applications, such as urban population density mapping or urban utility planning, a classification map based on individual buildings is much more informative. However, such semantic classification still poses some fundamental challenges, for example, how to retrieve fine boundaries of individual buildings. In this paper, we proposed a general framework for classifying…
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology(韩国科学技术院)
In urban cities, visual information on and along roadways is likely to distract drivers and lead to missing traffic signs and other accident-prone (AP) features. To avoid accidents due to missing these visual cues, this paper proposes a visual notification of AP-features to drivers based on real-time images obtained via dashcam. For this purpose, Google Street View images around accident hotspots (areas of dense accident occurrence) identified by a real-accident dataset are used to train a novel attention module to classify a given urban scene into an accident hotspot or a non-hotspot (area of…