So2Sat Urban Planet Symposium 2020

The So2Sat Urban Planet Symposium 2020 was successufly held in Earth Observation Center, German Aerospace Center, on Jan 08, 2020. We have the honor to have the president of IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society, Prof. Paolo Gamba from Pavia University, the collabration partner Prof. Richard Bamler from the Remote Sensing Technololgy Institute of DLR, the project scientific advisory board member Dr. Jens Weismüller from the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, and the industrial partner Tamas Feher from NVIDIA. A group photo of all the participants can be seen below.

During the Symposium, the PI Prof. Xiaoxiang Zhu presented the latest outcome of the project, which includes a global Local Climate Zone (LCZ) classification, building footprint extraction from Planet Labs data, and 3D city models reconstructed from TanDEM-X images. About 20 project members presented their recent development in novel algorithms in 3D reconstruction, land use land cover classification, urban geography, and population density estimation. The PI and the guests provided valuable suggestion to the project team. 

Background of So2Sat

So2Sat is an ambitious ERC project of monitoring global urbanization process. We apply novel AI concepts on nearly 10 petabytes of Earth observation and social media data to generate novel insights of global human settlements up to the level of 3 billion individual buildings worldwide, and transparent human population density maps with unprecedented resolution. This is seen as a giant leap for urban geography research as well as for formation of opinions for stakeholders based on resilient data. Please click here for more details of the project.