Roofpedia: Automatic mapping of green and solar roofs for an open roofscape registry and evaluation of urban sustainability
Abraham Noah Wu, Filip Biljecki

TL;DR
Roofpedia introduces an automated, scalable approach using satellite imagery and deep learning to map and evaluate green and solar roofs across multiple cities, aiding urban sustainability efforts.
Contribution
The paper presents a novel automated pipeline for mapping sustainable roofs, an open dataset of over one million buildings, and a benchmarking index for urban roofscape sustainability.
Findings
High accuracy detection of sustainable roofs in multiple cities
Open dataset covering over one million buildings
A new index to benchmark city roofscape sustainability
Abstract
Sustainable roofs, such as those with greenery and photovoltaic panels, contribute to the roadmap for reducing the carbon footprint of cities. However, research on sustainable urban roofscapes is rather focused on their potential and it is hindered by the scarcity of data, limiting our understanding of their current content, spatial distribution, and temporal evolution. To tackle this issue, we introduce Roofpedia, a set of three contributions: (i) automatic mapping of relevant urban roof typology from satellite imagery; (ii) an open roof registry mapping the spatial distribution and area of solar and green roofs of more than one million buildings across 17 cities; and (iii) the Roofpedia Index, a derivative of the registry, to benchmark the cities by the extent of sustainable roofscape in term of solar and green roof penetration. This project, partly inspired by its street greenery…
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