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Yuan, Jiangye

Publications and source records attributed to Yuan, Jiangye.

Impacts of the morphology of new neighborhoods on microclimate and building energy

In anticipation of emerging global urbanization and consequent increases in energy use and carbon dioxide emissions, better understanding and quantification of climate effects on energy use in cities are needed, requiring coordinated research into large-scale, regional, and microclimate impacts to and from the city structure. The methodology described here addresses this need by (1) demonstrating a process for creating and testing example morphologies for new neighborhoods for their impact on local and regional meteorology within a two-way-coupled four-domain nested mesoscale weather model (6 km horizontal resolution outer domain, 90 m horizontal innermost domain) and (2) allocating resulting building-level meteorological profiles to each building in a neighborhood for parallel computation of building-by-building energy use. Our Chicago Loop test case shows that the morphology of even a small new added development to a neighborhood affects not only its own microclimate, but also the microclimate of the original neighborhood to which the development was added, and that these changes in microclimate affect both neighborhoods’ building energy use. Furthermore, this method represents an important step toward quantifying and analyzing the relationships among climatic conditions, urban morphology, and energy use and using these relationships to inform energy-efficient urban development and planning.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗

Exploiting deep learning and volunteered geographic information for mapping buildings in Kano, Nigeria

Buildings in the developing world are inadequately mapped. Lack of such critical geospatial data adds unnecessary challenges to locating and reaching a large segment of the world’s most vulnerable population, impeding sustainability goals ranging from disaster relief to poverty reduction. Use of volunteered geographic information (VGI) has emerged as a widely accepted source to fill such voids. Despite its promise, availability of building maps for developing countries significantly lags behind demand. We present a new approach, coupling deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with VGI for automating building map generation from high-resolution satellite images for Kano state, Nigeria. Specifically, we trained a CNN with VGI building outlines of limited quality and quantity and generated building maps for a 50,000 km 2 area. Resulting maps are in strong agreement with existing settlement maps and require a fraction of the manual input needed for the latter. The VGI-based maps will provide support across multiple facets of socioeconomic development in Kano state, and demonstrates potential advancements in current mapping capabilities in resource constrained countries.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗

Building Extraction at Scale Using Convolutional Neural Network: Mapping of the United States

Establishing up-to-date large scale building maps is essential to understand the urban dynamics, such as estimating population, urban planning, and many other applications. Although many computer vision tasks have been successfully carried out with deep convolutional neural networks, there is a growing need to understand their large scale impact on building mapping with remote sensing imagery. In this paper, taking advantage of the scalability of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and using only few areas with the abundance of building footprints, for the first time we conduct a comparative analysis of four state-of-the-art CNNs for extracting building footprints across the entire continental United States. The four CNN architectures namely: Branch-out CNN, fully convolutional network (FCN), conditional random field as recurrent neural network (CRFasRNN), and SegNet, support semantic pixelwise labeling and focus on capturing textural information at multiscale. We use 1-meter resolution aerial images from National Agriculture Imagery Program as the test-bed, and compare the extraction results across the four methods. In addition, we propose to combine signed-distance labels with SegNet, the preferred CNN architecture identified by our extensive evaluations, to advance building extraction results to instance level. We further demonstrate the usefulness of fusing additional near IR information into the building extraction framework. Large scale experimental evaluations are conducted and reported using metrics that include: Precision, recall rate, intersection over union, and the number of buildings extracted. With the improved CNN model and no requirement of further postprocessing, we have generated building maps for the United States with an average processing time less than one minute for an area of size &#x223C;<!-- ~ --> 56 km 2 . Finally, the quality of extracted buildings and processing time demonstrated that the proposed CNN based framework fits the need of building extraction at scale.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Domain-Adapted Convolutional Networks for Satellite Image Classification: A Large-Scale Interactive Learning Workflow

Satellite imagery often exhibits large spatial extent areas that encompass object classes with considerable variability. This often limits large-scale model generalization with machine learning algorithms. Notably, acquisition conditions, including dates, sensor position, lighting condition, and sensor types, often translate into class distribution shifts introducing complex nonlinear factors and hamper the potential impact of machine learning classifiers. Here, this article investigates the challenge of exploiting satellite images using convolutional neural networks (CNN) for settlement classification where the class distribution shifts are significant. We present a large-scale human settlement mapping workflow based-off multiple modules to adapt a pretrained CNN to address the negative impact of distribution shift on classification performance. To extend a locally trained classifier onto large spatial extents areas we introduce several submodules: First, a human-in-the-loop element for relabeling of misclassified target domain samples to generate representative examples for model adaptation; second, an efficient hashing module to minimize redundancy and noisy samples from the mass-selected examples; and third, a novel relevance ranking module to minimize the dominance of source example on the target domain. The workflow presents a novel and practical approach to achieve large-scale domain adaptation with binary classifiers that are based-off CNN features. Experimental evaluations are conducted on areas of interest that encompass various image characteristics, including multisensors, multitemporal, and multiangular conditions. Domain adaptation is assessed on source–target pairs through the transfer loss and transfer ratio metrics to illustrate the utility of the workflow.

47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION↗

Developing 3D morphologies for simulating building energy demand in urban microclimates

In order to simulate the effect of interactions between urban morphology and microclimate on demand for heating and cooling in buildings, we utilize source elevation data to create 3D building geometries at the neighborhood and city scale. Additionally, we use urban morphology concepts to design virtual morphologies for simulation scenarios in an undeveloped land parcel. Using these morphologies, we compute building-energy parameters such as the density for each surface and the frontal area index for each of the buildings to be able to effectively model the microclimate for the urban area.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Toward large-scale building detection with convolutional neural network using remote sensing images

Establishing up-to-date nationwide building maps is essential to understand urban dynamics, such as estimating population and urban planning and many other applications. However, an efficient and effective solution is yet to be developed. In this paper, for the first time we evaluate three state-of-the-art CNNs for detecting buildings across entire United States using aerial images. The three CNN architectures, fully convolutional neural network, conditional random field as recurrent neural network, and SegNet, support semantic pixel-wise labeling and focus on capturing textural information at multi-scale. We use 1-meter resolution NAIP images as the test data set, and compare the detection results across the three methods. In addition, we propose to combine signed distance function labels with SegNet, which is the preferred CNN architecture identified by our extensive evaluations. The results are further improved in terms of precision, recall rate and the number of building detected. On average, model inference on test images is less than one minute for an area of size $\sim56$ $km^2$. With these promising results and the time required to process images, the framework offers great potential toward country scale building mapping with remote sensing imagery.

Yang, Lexie↗

Large-Scale Solar Panel Mapping from Aerial Images Using Deep Convolutional Networks

Up-to-date maps of installed solar photovoltaic panels are a critical input for policy and financial assessment of solar distributed generation. However, such maps for large areas are not available. With high coverage and low cost, aerial images enable large-scale mapping, bit it is highly difficult to automatically identify solar panels from images, which are small objects with varying appearances dispersed in complex scenes. We introduce a new approach based on deep convolutional networks, which effectively learns to delineate solar panels in aerial scenes. The approach has successfully mapped solar panels in imagery covering 200 square kilometers in two cities, using only 12 square kilometers of training data that are manually labeled.

Yuan, Jiangye↗

Image feature based GPS trace filtering for road network generation and road segmentation

We propose a new method to infer road networks from GPS trace data and accurately segment road regions in high-resolution aerial images. Unlike previous efforts that rely on GPS traces alone, we exploit image features to infer road networks from noisy trace data. The inferred road network is used to guide road segmentation. We show that the number of image segments spanned by the traces and the trace orientation validated with image features are important attributes for identifying GPS traces on road regions. Based on filtered traces , we construct road networks and integrate them with image features to segment road regions. Lastly, our experiments show that the proposed method produces more accurate road networks than the leading method that uses GPS traces alone, and also achieves high accuracy in segmenting road regions even with very noisy GPS data.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗

Factorization-based texture segmentation

This study introduces a factorization-based approach that efficiently segments textured images. We use local spectral histograms as features, and construct an M × N feature matrix using M-dimensional feature vectors in an N-pixel image. Based on the observation that each feature can be approximated by a linear combination of several representative features, we factor the feature matrix into two matrices-one consisting of the representative features and the other containing the weights of representative features at each pixel used for linear combination. The factorization method is based on singular value decomposition and nonnegative matrix factorization. The method uses local spectral histograms to discriminate region appearances in a computationally efficient way and at the same time accurately localizes region boundaries. Finally, the experiments conducted on public segmentation data sets show the promise of this simple yet powerful approach.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗