The paper introduces GBA-GCs, a large-scale multimodal benchmark for identifying gated and open residential compounds in China’s Greater Bay Area, comprising 37,444 compounds with satellite imagery, metadata, and verified labels. It presents MCGC, a vision-centric multimodal framework that fuses imagery, text, and structured data to accurately classify gated communities, outperforming existing baselines. Using the model, the authors map gated communities across the metropolitan area and uncover equity-related patterns such as clustered gated zones, privatized green space, and diminished pedestrian connectivity.
By Minwei Zhao, Weiming Zhang, Jiawang Du, Qiming Liu, Weiming Zhuang, Pei Nie, Cai Wu
The study evaluates how much street‑view imagery contributes to urban attribute prediction beyond existing public data. By comparing image‑based models with seven attributes from five public sources and three vision‑language models, the authors find that images outperform other data for building type, function, and low‑rise floor count, while existing data match or exceed image performance for road damage, curb ramps, and house price. The benefit of images varies with visual legibility and local data coverage, suggesting that image value depends on how well the scene is captured and how much complementary data is available.
By Kaizhen Tan
The paper introduces an adaptive region‑dividing strategy that projects a 3D point cloud onto a bird’s‑eye‑view plane to detect building regions, then back‑projects bounding boxes to create structure‑aligned training blocks for unified scene‑level evaluation. It also proposes a fine‑grained classification model using a point transformer classifier and a spatially‑supervised contrastive loss to improve inter‑class discriminability, addressing class imbalance with a weighted cross‑entropy. Experiments on UrbanBIS and STPLS3D datasets show the method outperforms state‑of‑the‑art approaches in both building instance segmentation and fine‑grained classification.
By Weiyuan Zhang, Qi Zhang, Hui Huang
arXiv:2609.28154v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Global building and settlement datasets increasingly support population mapping, exposure assessment, urban monitoring, and other analyses of the built...
By Rufai Omowunmi Balogun, Caroline Margaux Gevaert, Capucine Riom, Derrick Mirindi, Aaron Opdyke, Hamed Alemohammad, Pierre Chrzanowski, Edward Charles Anderson
arXiv:2608.20548v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Disaster damage is spatial: buildings rarely fail in isolation. Yet using spatial context for damage classification remains surprisingly underexplore...
By Fuad Hasan, Chul Min Yeum
arXiv:2606. 17403v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Rapid assessment of building damage from satellite imagery is essential for effective disaster response and recovery.
By Shikha V. Chandel, Yadav Raj Ghimire, Timothy Agboada, Leila Hashemi-Beni
arXiv:2607. 14756v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This research investigates the potential of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to infer building typologies: Construction, Current Use, and Storeys from Google Street View (GSV) images.
By Zahratu Shabrina, Muhammad Asa, Jin Rui, Lu Yin, Stephen Law
arXiv:2208. 00657v2 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Building detection and change detection using remote sensing images can help urban and rescue planning.
By Amir Mohammadian, Foad Ghaderi
arXiv:2610.01870v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Urban environments are shaped by design choices with long-term implications for health, safety, and quality of life, yet evaluating proposed interventi...
By Hosam Elgendy, Utkarsh Mall
arXiv:2510. 13774v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Forecasting urban phenomena such as housing prices and public health indicators requires the effective integration of various geospatial data.
By Dominik J. M\"uhlematter, Lin Che, Ye Hong, Martin Raubal, Nina Wiedemann
arXiv:2607. 22746v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Rapid post-disaster response requires timely, building-level information on whether structures remain intact, are damaged, or are destroyed.
By Hongruixuan Chen, He Huang, Haifeng Wang, Jian Song, Junjue Wang, Weihao Xuan, Hamish Mitchell, Jiepan Li, Wei He, Liangpei Zhang, Zijie Wang, Chen Zhong, Jiazhen Zhao, Lei Hu, Ting Hu, Hongyan Zhang, Gregory Angelides, Miriam Cha, Clifford Broni-Bediako, Junshi Xia, Taylor Perron, Naoto Yokoya
arXiv:2606. 15890v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Understanding urban wellbeing from multimodal data requires integrating heterogeneous spatial and temporal signals, posing significant challenges for current multimodal large language models (MLLMs).
By Yanxin Xi, Xiang Su, Jie Feng, Yu Liu, Sasu Tarkoma, Pan Hui