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Mapping Missing Population in Rural India: A Deep Learning Approach with Satellite Imagery

Published: 27 January 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Millions of people worldwide are absent from their country's census. Accurate, current, and granular population metrics are critical to improving government allocation of resources, to measuring disease control, to responding to natural disasters, and to studying any aspect of human life in these communities. Satellite imagery can provide sufficient information to build a population map without the cost and time of a government census. We present two Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architectures which efficiently and effectively combine satellite imagery inputs from multiple sources to accurately predict the population density of a region. In this paper, we use satellite imagery from rural villages in India and population labels from the 2011 SECC census. Our best model achieves better performance than previous papers as well as LandScan, a community standard for global population distribution.

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cover image ACM Conferences
AIES '19: Proceedings of the 2019 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society
January 2019
577 pages
ISBN:9781450363242
DOI:10.1145/3306618
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 27 January 2019

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Author Tags

  1. census
  2. computer vision
  3. convolutional neural network
  4. deep learning
  5. population
  6. satellite imagery

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  • Research-article

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  • Stanford Center on Global Poverty and Development

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AIES '19
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AIES '19: AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society
January 27 - 28, 2019
HI, Honolulu, USA

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Overall Acceptance Rate 61 of 162 submissions, 38%

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  • (2023)Tracking Socio-Economic Development in Rural India over Two Decades Using Satellite ImageryACM Journal on Computing and Sustainable Societies10.1145/36153611:2(1-31)Online publication date: 6-Dec-2023
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  • (2023)Spatiotemporal self-supervised pre-training on satellite imagery improves food insecurity predictionEnvironmental Data Science10.1017/eds.2023.422Online publication date: 18-Dec-2023
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