Detailed Settlement and Population Mapping: The High Resolution Settlement Layer
Abstract
Spatially detailed mapping of settlements for rural areas is often overlooked in the assembly of population databases, leading to an information gap for infrastructure planning, hazards data analysis, and humanitarian response. The High Resolution Settlement Layer (HRSL) provides estimates of human population distribution at a resolution of 1 arc-second (approximately 30m) for the year 2015. The population estimates are based on recent census data and high-resolution (0.5m) satellite imagery from DigitalGlobe. Computer vision techniques are used to identify the presence of buildings in the mosaic of imagery; the resulting Boolean surface is used to represent settlement extents. In version 1 of the HRSL, proportional allocation is used to allocate census data to the settlements, resulting in a population surface. New work improves over proportional allocation to estimate population within settlements using covariate layers. An overview of the improved methodology will be given, including an assessment of accuracy of the algorithm, along with a summary of the suitable uses of the data product.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018AGUFMIN44A..09Y
- Keywords:
-
- 0240 Public health;
- GEOHEALTHDE: 1630 Impacts of global change;
- GLOBAL CHANGEDE: 1980 Spatial analysis and representation;
- INFORMATICSDE: 4330 Vulnerability;
- NATURAL HAZARDS