Abstract
Population growth is increasingly happening in slum settlements of the large urban centers in the Global South. The term “slum” encompasses a wide range of communities, located mostly in underserved areas, and often exhibiting distinct structural and functional informalities with a relatively high concentration of marginalized populations. To address the issues confronting slums for effective planning and development, including the realistic estimation of the resident population, identifying them accurately is fundamental. Given the disagreements over a universal definition, diverse characteristic features, and socio-political limitations, global detection of slums is a veritable challenge. In this paper, we present experiments in slum detection using a scene classification algorithm and 3-meter spatial resolution satellite imagery. We train and evaluate the model for slum detection in Mumbai, India for the year 2023 and test the temporal generalization of the trained model on Mumbai in 2020 and 2018. In addition, we explore the pathways toward geographic generalization to Kolkata and Delhi (India). We discuss several limitations in the workflow and model, situate our findings in the existing literature, and suggest improvements and alternatives. With this, we establish baseline methods and experiments as a first step towards developing an image-based global slum detection framework and algorithm. This work adds to the community discussion on methods, data challenges, and open questions related to the detection of slums globally. With this research, we hope to improve our understanding of human settlements, especially in critical areas, improve population estimates, and help measure progress towards the sustainable development goals.
Original language | English |
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Pages | 1576-1580 |
Number of pages | 5 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 2024 |
Event | 2024 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, IGARSS 2024 - Athens, Greece Duration: Jul 7 2024 → Jul 12 2024 |
Conference
Conference | 2024 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, IGARSS 2024 |
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Country/Territory | Greece |
City | Athens |
Period | 07/7/24 → 07/12/24 |
Funding
We acknowledge that this manuscript has been authored by UT-Battelle, LLC under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the U.S. Department of Energy. The United States Government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the United States Government retains a non-exclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, world-wide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for United States Government purposes. DOE will provide public access to these results of federally sponsored research in accordance with the DOE Public Access Plan (http://energy.gov/downloads/doe-public-access-plan). This work utilized data made available through the NASA Commercial Smallsat Data Acquisition (CSDA) Program.
Keywords
- deep learning
- Global South
- population
- scene classification
- SDGs
- slums