TEMPO: Global Temporal Building Density and Height Estimation from Satellite Imagery

TL;DR

TEMPO is a global dataset derived from satellite imagery that provides temporally resolved maps of building density and height, enabling large-scale monitoring of urban development and climate impacts.

Contribution

We introduce TEMPO, a novel deep learning-based method to generate global, temporally detailed maps of building density and height from satellite data.

Findings

Achieved F1 scores between 85% and 88% on validation datasets.

Produced stable, five-year trend-consistent estimates with a 0.96 score.

Enabled efficient large-scale urban monitoring at low computational cost.

Abstract

We present TEMPO, a global, temporally resolved dataset of building density and height derived from high-resolution satellite imagery using deep learning models. We pair building footprint and height data from existing datasets with quarterly PlanetScope basemap satellite images to train a multi-task deep learning model that predicts building density and building height at a 37.6-meter per pixel resolution. We apply this model to global PlanetScope basemaps from Q1 2018 through Q2 2025 to create global, temporal maps of building density and height. We validate these maps by comparing against existing building footprint datasets. Our estimates achieve an F1 score between 85% and 88% on different hand-labeled subsets, and are temporally stable, with a 0.96 five-year trend-consistency score. TEMPO captures quarterly changes in built settlements at a fraction of the computational cost of comparable approaches, unlocking large-scale monitoring of development patterns and climate impacts essential for global resilience and adaptation efforts.