Related papers: Mapping Informal Settlements in Developing Countri…
Accurate and comprehensive measurements of a range of sustainable development outcomes are fundamental inputs into both research and policy. We synthesize the growing literature that uses satellite imagery to understand these outcomes, with…
Poverty mapping is a powerful tool to study the geography of poverty. The choice of the spatial resolution is central as poverty measures defined at a coarser level may mask their heterogeneity at finer levels. We introduce a small area…
Mapping the spatial distribution of poverty in developing countries remains an important and costly challenge. These "poverty maps" are key inputs for poverty targeting, public goods provision, political accountability, and impact…
Rapid urban expansion has fueled the growth of informal settlements in major cities of low- and middle-income countries, with Lahore and Karachi in Pakistan and Mumbai in India serving as prominent examples. However, large-scale mapping of…
Poverty maps derived from satellite imagery are increasingly used to inform high-stakes policy decisions, such as the allocation of humanitarian aid and the distribution of government resources. Such poverty maps are typically constructed…
High-resolution daytime satellite imagery has become a promising source to study economic activities. These images display detailed terrain over large areas and allow zooming into smaller neighborhoods. Existing methods, however, have…
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) aim to resolve societal challenges, such as eradicating poverty and improving the lives of vulnerable populations in impoverished areas. Those areas rely on road infrastructure construction to…
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…
Surprisingly a number of Earth's waterways remain unmapped, with a significant number in low and middle income countries. Here we build a computer vision model (WaterNet) to learn the location of waterways in the United States, based on…
Publicly available satellite imagery can be an ubiquitous, cheap, and powerful tool for vehicle localisation when a prior sensor map is unavailable. However, satellite images are not directly comparable to data from ground range sensors…
Earth observation (EO) data such as satellite imagery can have far-reaching impacts on our understanding of the geography of poverty, especially when coupled with machine learning (ML) and computer vision. Early research used computer…
Large datasets of sub-meter aerial imagery represented as orthophoto mosaics are widely available today, and these data sets may hold a great deal of untapped information. This imagery has a potential to locate several types of features;…
Implicit neural representations (INRs) exhibit growing promise in addressing Earth representation challenges, ranging from emissions monitoring to climate modeling. However, existing methods disproportionately prioritize global average…
Glacier mapping is key to ecological monitoring in the hkh region. Climate change poses a risk to individuals whose livelihoods depend on the health of glacier ecosystems. In this work, we present a machine learning based approach to…
As the world marked the midterm of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030, many countries are still struggling to monitor their climate and disaster risk because of the expensive large-scale survey of the distribution of…
LiDAR (short for "Light Detection And Ranging" or "Laser Imaging, Detection, And Ranging") technology can be used to provide detailed three-dimensional elevation maps of urban and rural landscapes. To date, airborne LiDAR imaging has been…
In recent years, machine learning has become crucial in remote sensing analysis, particularly in the domain of Land-use/Land-cover (LULC). The synergy of machine learning and satellite imagery analysis has demonstrated significant…
Spatial information on cropland distribution, often called cropland or crop maps, are critical inputs for a wide range of agriculture and food security analyses and decisions. However, high-resolution cropland maps are not readily available…
Developing countries usually lack the proper governance means to generate and regularly update a national rooftop map. Using traditional photogrammetry and surveying methods to produce a building map at the federal level is costly and time…
Analyzing the planet at scale with satellite imagery and machine learning is a dream that has been constantly hindered by the cost of difficult-to-access highly-representative high-resolution imagery. To remediate this, we introduce here…