Phenotyping urban built and natural environments with high-resolution satellite images and unsupervised deep learning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Cities in the developing world are expanding rapidly, and undergoing changes to their roads, buildings, vegetation, and other land use characteristics. Timely data are needed to ensure that urban change enhances health, wellbeing and sustainability. We present and evaluate a novel unsupervised deep clustering method to classify and characterise the complex and multidimensional built and natural environments of cities into interpretable clusters using high-resolution satellite images. We applied our approach to a high-resolution (0.3 m/pixel) satellite image of Accra, Ghana, one of the fastest growing cities in sub-Saharan Africa, and contextualised the results with demographic and environmental data that were not used for clustering. We show that clusters obtained solely from images capture distinct interpretable phenotypes of the urban natural (vegetation and water) and built (building count, size, density, and orientation; length and arrangement of roads) environment, and population, either as a unique defining characteristic (e.g., bodies of water or dense vegetation) or in combination (e.g., buildings surrounded by vegetation or sparsely populated areas intermixed with roads). Clusters that were based on a single defining characteristic were robust to the spatial scale of analysis and the choice of cluster number, whereas those based on a combination of characteristics changed based on scale and number of clusters. The results demonstrate that satellite data and unsupervised deep learning provide a cost-effective, interpretable and scalable approach for real-time tracking of sustainable urban development, especially where traditional environmental and demographic data are limited and infrequent.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".