Building Floorspace in China: A Dataset and Learning Pipeline
It provides a first milestone dataset for urban planning and development research in China, though it is incremental as it applies existing multi-task learning methods to new satellite data.
This paper tackles the problem of measuring building floorspace (footprint and height) for 40 major Chinese cities using satellite imagery, resulting in a publicly available dataset and pipeline that correlates with nightlight data for urban development analysis.
This paper provides a first milestone in measuring the floorspace of buildings (that is, building footprint and height) for 40 major Chinese cities. The intent is to maximize city coverage and, eventually provide longitudinal data. Doing so requires building on imagery that is of a medium-fine-grained granularity, as larger cross sections of cities and longer time series for them are only available in such format. We use a multi-task object segmenter approach to learn the building footprint and height in the same framework in parallel: (1) we determine the surface area is covered by any buildings (the square footage of occupied land); (2) we determine floorspace from multi-image representations of buildings from various angles to determine the height of buildings. We use Sentinel-1 and -2 satellite images as our main data source. The benefits of these data are their large cross-sectional and longitudinal scope plus their unrestricted accessibility. We provide a detailed description of our data, algorithms, and evaluations. In addition, we analyze the quality of reference data and their role for measuring the building floorspace with minimal error. We conduct extensive quantitative and qualitative analyses with Shenzhen as a case study using our multi-task learner. Finally, we conduct correlation studies between our results (on both pixel and aggregated urban area levels) and nightlight data to gauge the merits of our approach in studying urban development. Our data and codebase are publicly accessible under https://gitlab.ethz.ch/raox/urban-satellite-public-v2.