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Morphological (e.g. shape, size, and height) and function (e.g. working, living, and shopping) information of buildings is highly needed for urban planning and management as well as other applications such as city-scale building energy use modeling. Due to the limited availability of socio-economic geospatial data, it is more challenging to map building functions than building morphological information, especially over large areas. In this study, we proposed an integrated framework to map building functions in 50 U.S. cities by integrating multi-source web-based geospatial data. First, a web crawler was developed to extract Points of Interest (POIs) from Tripadvisor.com, and a map crawler was developed to extract POIs and land use parcels from Google Maps. Second, an unsupervised machine learning algorithm named OneClassSVM was used to identify residential buildings based on landscape features derived from Microsoft building footprints. Third, the type ratio of POIs and the area ratio of land use parcels were used to identify six non-residential functions (i.e. hospital, hotel, school, shop, restaurant, and office). The accuracy assessment indicates that the proposed framework performed well, with an average overall accuracy of 94% and a kappa coefficient of 0.63. With the worldwide coverage of Google Maps and Tripadvisor.com, the proposed framework is transferable to other cities over the world. The data products generated from this study are of great use for quantitative city-scale urban studies, such as building energy use modeling at the single building level over large areas.
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Automatic Deep Inference of Procedural Cities from Global-scale Spatial Data
Recent advances in big spatial data acquisition and deep learning allow novel algorithms that were not possible several years ago. We introduce a novel inverse procedural modeling algorithm for urban areas that addresses the problem of spatial data quality and uncertainty. Our method is fully automatic and produces a 3D approximation of an urban area given satellite imagery and global-scale data, including road network, population, and elevation data. By analyzing the values and the distribution of urban data, e.g., parcels, buildings, population, and elevation, we construct a procedural approximation of a city at a large-scale. Our approach has three main components: (1) procedural model generation to create parcel and building geometries, (2) parcel area estimation that trains neural networks to provide initial parcel sizes for a segmented satellite image of a city block, and (3) an optional optimization that can use partial knowledge of overall average building footprint area and building counts to improve results. We demonstrate and evaluate our approach on cities around the globe with widely different structures and automatically yield procedural models with up to 91,000 buildings, and spanning up to 150 km 2 . We obtain both a spatial arrangement of parcels and buildings similar to ground truth and a distribution of building sizes similar to ground truth, hence yielding a statistically similar synthetic urban space. We produce procedural models at multiple scales, and with less than 1% error in parcel and building areas in the best case as compared to ground truth and 5.8% error on average for tested cities.
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- PAR ID:
- 10286871
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ACM Transactions on Spatial Algorithms and Systems
- Volume:
- 7
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 2374-0353
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 28
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3423422
