Identifying Urban Poverty Using High-Resolution Satellite Imagery and Machine Learning Approaches: Implications for Housing Inequality

Abstract

Enriching Asian perspectives on the rapid identification of urban poverty and its implications for housing inequality, this paper contributes empirical evidence about the utility of image features derived from high-resolution satellite imagery and machine learning approaches for identifying urban poverty in China at the community level. For the case of the Jiangxia District and Huangpi District of Wuhan, image features, including perimeter, line segment detector (LSD), Hough transform, gray-level cooccurrence matrix (GLCM), histogram of oriented gradients (HoG), and local binary patterns (LBP), are calculated, and four machine learning approaches and 25 variables are applied to identify urban poverty and relatively important variables. The results show that image features and machine learning approaches can be used to identify urban poverty with the best model performance with a coefficient of determination, R², of 0.5341 and 0.5324 for Jiangxia and Huangpi, respectively, although some differences exist among the approaches and study areas. The importance of each variable differs for each approach and study area; however, the relatively important variables are similar. In particular, four variables achieved relatively satisfactory prediction results for all models and presented obvious differences in varying communities with different poverty levels. Housing inequality within low-income neighborhoods, which is a response to gaps in wealth, income, and housing affordability among social groups, is an important manifestation of urban poverty. Policy makers can implement these findings to rapidly identify urban poverty, and the findings have potential applications for addressing housing inequality and proving the rationality of urban planning for building a sustainable society.