arXiv Machine Learning

Beyond Binary Rooftop Mapping: A Four-Class Deep Learning Framework for Green Roof Potential Assessment from Open Swiss Geospatial Data

arXiv:2607. 22342v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The development of effective urban climate adaptation strategies requires comprehensive spatial information on rooftops and buildings, since such information underpins the assessment of ecosystem services provided by green infrastructure, particularly for urban heat island (UHI) mitigation.

arXiv Computer Vision
Nov 2

An Empirical Study on Learning Rooftop Solar Potential from Satellite Imagery Directly Without Explicit Geometry

The paper introduces Direct Rooftop Solar Prediction (DRSP), an end‑to‑end method that estimates rooftop solar potential directly from satellite images and regional sunlight data, bypassing explicit geometric reconstruction. DRSP does not predict roof orientation, slope, height, or DSMs, and therefore requires no geometric intermediate supervision. The authors built a large‑scale dataset from the Google Solar API, comprising about 60K rooftops in the U.S. Midwest and 87K in Texas, and evaluated how factors such as geographic training distribution, model depth, image resolution, and sunlight conditioning affect performance.

By Joshua Lee
arXiv Computer Vision
5d ago

Building age estimation based on widely available multi-source geospatial data

The paper introduces a deep‑learning framework that estimates building age using widely available multi‑source geospatial data, including satellite imagery, Digital Surface Models, and building footprints. It employs a pretrained backbone with fine‑tuning adapters, raster‑derived and property‑derived fusion modules, and a pyramid decoder with Cosine‑guided Mixture‑of‑Experts for pixel‑level predictions, while instance‑level predictions use attention pooling and Property‑Conditional Adaptive Instance Normalization. A Temporal Ordinal Constraint Loss enforces the natural ordering of building ages, and the authors provide a new Hong Kong building age benchmark along with open‑source code and datasets.

By Jialu Sui, Hongsheng Zhang, Rui Liu, Jing Ling, Ruisheng Wang, Hao Wu, Gang Chen
arXiv AI
Jul 9

CarbonCLIP: Enhance Carbon Prediction from Satellite Imagery via Integrated Street-View Semantics and Temporal Context Training

arXiv:2607. 07292v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurately estimating urban carbon emissions is critical for sustainable urban planning, yet many existing approaches remain difficult to apply consistently across cities due to data-source heterogeneity and the lack of fine-grained semantic-temporal context in remote sensing data.

By Zeru Yang, Fang-Ying Gong, Steve H. L. Yim, Chau Yuen
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 29

DeepC4: Deep Conditional Census-Constrained Clustering for Large-scale Multitask Spatial Disaggregation of Urban Morphology

DeepC4 is a deep learning-based spatial disaggregation method that uses local census statistics as cluster-level constraints and incorporates multiple conditional label relationships in a multitask learning framework. Applied to Rwandan urban morphology, it achieves macro‑F1 scores of 0.63, 0.78, and 0.45 for roof, wall, and height prediction, respectively, and estimates national dwelling and occupant counts within about 1.1% error compared to census records. The approach outperforms existing GEM and METEOR methods and covers 32‑49% more 500‑meter grid pixels across provinces.

By Joshua Dimasaka, Christian Gei{\ss}, Emily So
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 28

Mapping Woody Vegetation from Multi-Source Imagery and Prediction Fusion for Enhanced Data Efficiency and Accuracy

The paper presents a framework that enhances deep‑learning tree‑cover mapping in New South Wales by fusing multiple imagery sources and normalizing image quality. It introduces an image‑composition technique that removes defects and a prediction‑fusion method that reduces reliance on any single image, together cutting errors by 38.2 % and 53.6 % respectively. Label transfer across diverse imagery further boosts data efficiency, yielding error reductions of 28.1 %–76.2 % and a 13‑fold decrease in performance variability across dates.

By Kal Backman, Jared Wood, Adam Roff
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 27

OpenCVL: An Open, Diverse, and Large-Scale Dataset for Fine-Grained Cross-View Localization

OpenCVL is a large, open dataset for fine-grained cross-view localization, comprising 617,388 ground‑aerial image pairs from 41 European cities. It blends high‑end sensor data with diverse in‑the‑wild images and includes a curation framework to correct pose annotations, enabling reliable evaluation. The dataset also offers cross‑area and snowy test sets to probe generalization, and experiments show that adding noisy in‑the‑wild data improves model performance on clean tests.

By Zimin Xia, Mubariz Zaffar, Junsheng Fu, Alexandre Alahi, Julian F. P. Kooij
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Tabular Deep Learning vs Classical Machine Learning for Urban Land Cover Classification

The paper compares classical machine learning algorithms—such as Logistic Regression, SVM, Random Forest, XGBoost, and CatBoost—with Tabular Deep Learning models (TabNet, FT-Transformer, TabTransformer, TabSeq, and 1D CNNs) for urban land cover classification using a UCI dataset derived from high‑resolution aerial imagery. It evaluates performance across nine land cover classes, addressing challenges like high dimensionality, heterogeneous features, and class imbalance by applying weighted cross‑entropy loss for deep models and measuring accuracy, macro‑precision, macro‑recall, macro‑F1, AUC‑ROC, and confusion matrices. Results indicate that while tree ensembles remain strong baselines, Tabular Deep Learning can match or surpass them when non‑linear interactions are prominent and imbalance handling is effective.

By Muntasir Tabasum, Tanpia Tasnim, Md. Ekramul Islam, Al Zadid Sultan Bin Habib
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 12

Revisiting the Task of Building Damage Assessment by Satellite Imaging

The paper revisits building damage assessment (BDA) from satellite imagery, emphasizing the need for a sensor‑agnostic, instance‑based task definition that can handle missing pre‑event data. It reviews existing datasets by modality, timing, and geography, critiques current single‑score evaluation practices, and proposes a more robust, ranking‑based multi‑score protocol. The authors also survey deep learning methods, highlight challenges in generalizing to new events and regions, and outline how these insights could shape future BDA challenges and data‑sharing practices.

By Anthony Cioppa, Virgile Blua, S\'ebastien Pi\'erard, Pietro Ceccato, Marc Van Droogenbroeck