Estimating the Impact of COVID-19 on Travel Demand in Houston Area Using Deep Learning and Satellite Imagery

TL;DR

This paper uses high-resolution satellite imagery and deep learning to estimate COVID-19's impact on travel demand in Houston, revealing a 30% reduction in cars at key locations during 2020.

Contribution

It introduces a car-counting model using Detectron2 and Faster R-CNN on satellite images to assess travel demand changes due to COVID-19.

Findings

Car presence reduced by 30% in 2020 compared to 2019

Satellite imagery effectively estimates travel demand and economic activity

Deep learning models provide reliable transportation insights

Abstract

Considering recent advances in remote sensing satellite systems and computer vision algorithms, many satellite sensing platforms and sensors have been used to monitor the condition and usage of transportation infrastructure systems. The level of details that can be detected increases significantly with the increase of ground sample distance (GSD), which is around 15 cm - 30 cm for high-resolution satellite images. In this study, we analyzed data acquired from high-resolution satellite imagery to provide insights, predictive signals, and trend for travel demand estimation. More specifically, we estimate the impact of COVID-19 in the metropolitan area of Houston using satellite imagery from Google Earth Engine datasets. We developed a car-counting model through Detectron2 and Faster R-CNN to monitor the presence of cars within different locations (i.e., university, shopping mall, community plaza, restaurant, supermarket) before and during the COVID-19. The results show that the number of cars detected at these selected locations reduced on average 30% in 2020 compared with the previous year 2019. The results also show that satellite imagery provides rich information for travel demand and economic activity estimation. Together with advanced computer vision and deep learning algorithms, it can generate reliable and accurate information for transportation agency decision makers.