SLUM-i: Semi-supervised Learning for Urban Mapping of Informal Settlements and Data Quality Benchmarking
School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST)（电气工程与计算机科学学院，国立科学与技术大学（NUST））；Smart Data & Knowledge Services, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI)（智能数据与知识服务，德国人工智能研究中心（DFKI））
Muhammad Taha Mukhtar, Syed Musa Ali Kazmi, Khola Naseem, Muhammad Ali Chattha, Andreas Dengel, Sheraz Ahmed, Muhammad Naseer Bajwa, Muhammad Imran Malik
Very-high-resolution remote-sensing imagery provides a scalable basis for delineating informal settlements, but sparse annotations, severe imbalance between informal-settlement and background pixels, and cross-city heterogeneity in urban morphology and image--mask correspondence complicate model development. We present SLUM-i, a semi-supervised semantic segmentation framework together with a geographically diverse seven-city Earth observation benchmark spanning three continents. The benchmark combines a newly annotated Lahore dataset and companion Karachi and Mumbai datasets with four publicly released city datasets, totaling 14,458 RGB image--mask tiles. We quantify cross-city heterogeneity using class composition, boundary morphology, grayscale separability, correspondence between mask boundaries and image edges, and divergence between measured feature distributions. For label-efficient mapping, SLUM-i combines representation-guided unlabeled-pool curation, using embeddings from a vision foundation model (DINOv2-Small) to remove the least-similar tiles, and Class-Aware Adaptive Thresholding, which adapts pseudo-label acceptance by class through global mean-confidence and per-class mean-softmax exponential moving averages. Experiments at 10%, 20%, and 30% label budgets, using convolutional and vision-transformer backbones and five random seeds, demonstrate improvements over the corresponding UniMatch baselines in multiple city--budget settings, reaching +5.9 percentage points in mean intersection-over-union. At the 30% budget, the ResNet-101 configuration matches or exceeds its corresponding fully labeled supervised baseline in four of seven cities. Both components operate only during training and add no inference overhead.
Building and Road Recognition in Dense Urban Informal Settlements: A Dataset and Benchmark
Guangdong Provincial Project（广东省项目）；Guangzhou-HKUST(GZ) Joint Funding Program（广州-香港科技大学联合基金计划）；AI Research and Learning Base of Urban Culture Project（城市文化AI研究与学习基地项目）
Within the burgeoning expansion of deep learning and computer vision across the different fields of science, when it comes to urban development, deep learning and computer vision applications are still limited towards the notions of smart cities and autonomous vehicles. Indeed, a wide gap of knowledge appears when it comes to cities and urban regions in less developed countries where the chaos of informality is the dominant scheme. How can deep learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI) untangle the complexities of informality to advance urban modelling and our understanding of cities? Various …
DFKI（德国人工智能研究中心）；TU Kaiserlautern（凯泽斯劳滕工业大学）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；DLR（德国航空航天中心）；King’s College London（伦敦国王学院）；Czech Geological Survey（捷克地质调查局）；University of Warsaw（华沙大学）
Detecting and mapping informal settlements encompasses several of the United Nations sustainable development goals. This is because informal settlements are home to the most socially and economically vulnerable people on the planet. Thus, understanding where these settlements are is of paramount importance to both government and non-government organizations (NGOs), such as the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), who can use this information to deliver effective social and economic aid. We propose a method that detects and maps the locations of informal settlements using only freely availa…
DFKI（德国人工智能研究中心）；TU Kaiserlautern（凯泽斯劳滕工业大学）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；DLR（德国航空航天中心）；King’s College London（伦敦国王学院）；Czech Geological Survey（捷克地质调查局）；University of Warsaw（华沙大学）
Detecting and mapping informal settlements encompasses several of the United Nations sustainable development goals. This is because informal settlements are home to the most socially and economically vulnerable people on the planet. Thus, understanding where these settlements are is of paramount importance to both government and non-government organizations (NGOs), such as the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), who can use this information to deliver effective social and economic aid. We propose two effective methods for detecting and mapping the locations of informal settlements. One us…
Deep Learning for Slum Mapping in Remote Sensing Images: A Meta-analysis and Review
Centre of Excellence in Artificial Intelligence, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur（印度理工学院卡拉格普尔分校人工智能卓越中心）；Tata Consultancy Services Research（塔塔咨询服务公司研究院）
Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；Pontíficia Universidade Católica do Paraná（巴拉那天主教大学）
One billion people live in informal settlements worldwide. The complex and multilayered spaces that characterize this unplanned form of urbanization pose a challenge to traditional approaches to mapping and morphological analysis. This study proposes a methodology to study the morphological properties of informal settlements based on terrestrial LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) data collected in Rocinha, the largest favela in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Our analysis operates at two resolutions, including a \emph{global} analysis focused on comparing different streets of the favela to one anothe…
Robert Bosch Center for Cyber Physical Systems（罗伯特·博世信息物理系统研究中心）；Indian Institute of Science（印度科学学院）；Indian Institute of Technology Bombay（印度理工学院孟买分校）
More than one billion people live in slums around the world. In some developing countries, slum residents make up for more than half of the population and lack reliable sanitation services, clean water, electricity, other basic services. Thus, slum rehabilitation and improvement is an important global challenge, and a significant amount of effort and resources have been put into this endeavor. These initiatives rely heavily on slum mapping and monitoring, and it is essential to have robust and efficient methods for mapping and monitoring existing slum settlements. In this work, we introduce an…
University of Oxford（牛津大学）；DFKI（德国人工智能研究中心）；TU Kaiserslautern（凯泽斯劳滕工业大学）；DLR Institute for Planetary（德国航空航天中心行星研究所）；Kings College London（伦敦国王学院）；Czech Geological Survey（捷克地质调查局）；University of Warsaw（华沙大学）
Informal settlements are home to the most socially and economically vulnerable people on the planet. In order to deliver effective economic and social aid, non-government organizations (NGOs), such as the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), require detailed maps of the locations of informal settlements. However, data regarding informal and formal settlements is primarily unavailable and if available is often incomplete. This is due, in part, to the cost and complexity of gathering data on a large scale. To address these challenges, we, in this work, provide three contributions. 1) A brand…
Neighbor-aware informal settlement mapping with graph convolutional networks
ESPACE-DEV, French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development (IRD), University of Montpellier, France（法国可持续发展国家研究所（IRD）、蒙彼利埃大学，法国）；ICICT, Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil（奥古斯托·克鲁兹基金会（Fiocruz）、里约热内卢，巴西）
University of Warwick（华威大学）；NYU（纽约大学）；The Alan Turing Institute（艾伦·图灵研究所）
We propose a generalizable framework for the population estimation of dense, informal settlements in low-income urban areas--so called 'slums'--using high-resolution satellite imagery. Precise population estimates are a crucial factor for efficient resource allocations by government authorities and NGO's, for instance in medical emergencies. We utilize equitable ground-truth data, which is gathered in collaboration with local communities: Through training and community mapping, the local population contributes their unique domain knowledge, while also maintaining agency over their data. This p…
Mapping Rio de Janeiro's favelas: general-purpose vs. satellite-specific neural networks
Espace-Dev, French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development, University of Montpellier, France（Espace-Dev，法国可持续发展国家研究院，蒙彼利埃大学，法国）；Institute of Scientific and Technological Communication and Information in Health, Fiocruz, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil（健康科学与技术通信与信息研究所，菲奥克鲁兹，里约热内卢，巴西）；Department of Geography, University of Brasilia, Brazil（地理系，巴西利亚大学，巴西）；International Joint Laboratory "Sentinela"（国际联合实验室"Sentinela"）
A High Resolution Urban and Rural Settlement Map of Africa Using Deep Learning and Satellite Imagery
Institute for Analytical Sociology, Linköping University, Sweden（分析社会研究所，利尔贝里大学，瑞典）；Geomatics, Department of Environmental and Life Sciences, Karlstad University, Sweden（测绘学，环境与生命科学系，卡尔斯塔德大学，瑞典）；Department of Statistics, Harvard University, Massachusetts, USA（统计学系，哈佛大学，马萨诸塞州，美国）；Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden（计算机科学与工程系，查尔姆斯理工大学，哥德堡，瑞典）；The AI and Global Development Lab (www.global-lab.ai)（人工智能与全球发展实验室）
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Baidu Research（百度研究院）；Baidu Inc.（百度公司）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））；Guangzhou HKUST Fok Ying Tung Research Institute（广州香港科技大学霍英东研究院）
Urban villages (UVs) refer to the underdeveloped informal settlement falling behind the rapid urbanization in a city. Since there are high levels of social inequality and social risks in these UVs, it is critical for city managers to discover all UVs for making appropriate renovation policies. Existing approaches to detecting UVs are labor-intensive or have not fully addressed the unique challenges in UV detection such as the scarcity of labeled UVs and the diverse urban patterns in different regions. To this end, we first build an urban region graph (URG) to model the urban area in a hierarch…
