Jeasurk Yang

Sumin Lee, Sungwon Park, Jeasurk Yang et al.

Satellite-based slum segmentation holds significant promise in generating global estimates of urban poverty. However, the morphological heterogeneity of informal settlements presents a major challenge, hindering the ability of models trained on specific regions to generalize effectively to unseen locations. To address this, we introduce a large-scale high-resolution dataset and propose GRAM (Generalized Region-Aware Mixture-of-Experts), a two-phase test-time adaptation framework that enables robust slum segmentation without requiring labeled data from target regions. We compile a million-scale satellite imagery dataset from 12 cities across four continents for source training. Using this dataset, the model employs a Mixture-of-Experts architecture to capture region-specific slum characteristics while learning universal features through a shared backbone. During adaptation, prediction consistency across experts filters out unreliable pseudo-labels, allowing the model to generalize effectively to previously unseen regions. GRAM outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in low-resource settings such as African cities, offering a scalable and label-efficient solution for global slum mapping and data-driven urban planning.

Sungwon Han, Donghyun Ahn, Hyunji Cha et al.

Satellite imagery has long been an attractive data source that provides a wealth of information on human-inhabited areas. While super resolution satellite images are rapidly becoming available, little study has focused on how to extract meaningful information about human habitation patterns and economic scales from such data. We present READ, a new approach for obtaining essential spatial representation for any given district from high-resolution satellite imagery based on deep neural networks. Our method combines transfer learning and embedded statistics to efficiently learn critical spatial characteristics of arbitrary size areas and represent them into a fixed-length vector with minimal information loss. Even with a small set of labels, READ can distinguish subtle differences between rural and urban areas and infer the degree of urbanization. An extensive evaluation demonstrates the model outperforms the state-of-the-art in predicting economic scales, such as population density for South Korea (R^2=0.9617), and shows a high potential use for developing countries where district-level economic scales are not known.