Mapping Temporary Slums From Satellite Imagery Using a Semi-Supervised Approach

One billion people worldwide are estimated to be living in slums, and documenting and analyzing these regions is a challenging task. When compared with regular slums; the small, scattered, and temporary nature of temporary slums makes data collection and labeling tedious and time-consuming. To tackle this challenging problem of temporary slums detection, we present a semi-supervised deep learning segmentation-based approach; with the strategy to detect initial seed images in zero-labeled data settings. A small set of seed samples (32 in our case) are automatically discovered by analyzing the temporal changes, which are manually labeled to train a segmentation and representation learning module. The
segmentation module
gathers high-dimensional image representations, and the representation
learning module
transforms image representations into embedding vectors. After that, a scoring module uses the embedding vectors to sample images from a large pool of unlabeled images and generates pseudo-labels for the sampled images. These sampled images with their pseudo-labels are added to the training set to update the segmentation and representation learning modules iteratively. To analyze the effectiveness of our technique, we construct a large geographically marked dataset of temporary slums. This dataset constitutes more than 200 potential temporary slum locations (2.28 km
²
) found by sieving 68000 images from 12 metropolitan cities of Pakistan covering 8000 km
²
. Furthermore, our proposed method outperforms several competitive semi-supervised semantic segmentation baselines on a similar setting. The code and the dataset will be made publicly available.