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

Abstract

To understand our global progress for sustainable development and disaster risk reduction in many developing economies, two recent major initiatives - the Uniform African Exposure Dataset of the Global Earthquake Model (GEM) Foundation and the Modelling Exposure through Earth Observation Routines (METEOR) Project - implemented classical spatial disaggregation techniques to generate large-scale mapping of urban morphology using the information from various satellite imagery and its derivatives, geospatial datasets of the built environment, and subnational census statistics. However, the local discrepancy with well-validated census statistics and the propagated model uncertainties remain a challenge in such coarse-to-fine-grained mapping problems, specifically constrained by weak and conditional label supervision. Therefore, we present Deep Conditional Census-Constrained Clustering (DeepC4), a novel deep learning-based spatial disaggregation approach that incorporates local census statistics as cluster-level constraints while considering multiple conditional label relationships in a joint multitask learning of the patterns of satellite imagery. As a demonstration using Rwandan urban morphology, DeepC4 achieves macro-F1 scores of 0.63, 0.78, and 0.45 and macro-mIoU of 0.57, 0.71, and 0.42 for roof, wall, and height prediction respectively, estimates national dwelling and occupant counts within 1.13% and 1.11% error compared to census records, outperforming GEM (2.03% and 3.29%), and occupies 32%-49% more 500-meter grid pixels than METEOR across provinces. As the world approaches the conclusion of many global frameworks in 2030, our work offers a new deep learning-based mapping technique that explicitly encodes well-validated census and experts'belief systems to achieve an explainable and interpretable auditing of existing coarse-grained derived information at large scales.