Phenotyping urban built and natural environments with high-resolution satellite images and unsupervised deep learning

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 highresolution 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 charac- teristic (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 combina- tion 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 track- ing of sustainable urban development, especially where traditional environmental and demographic data are limited and infrequent.

Automated summary

Cities in the developing world are experiencing rapid expansion and changes in their land use characteristics. This study presents a novel method using high-resolution satellite images to classify and characterize different urban environments. The results show that clusters obtained from the images accurately capture different phenotypes of the built and natural environment, as well as population characteristics. This approach provides a cost-effective and interpretable method for tracking sustainable urban development in areas with limited traditional data.