Waffle Homes: Utilizing Aerial Imagery of Unfinished Buildings to Determine Average Room Size (Short Paper)

Authors Carson Woody , Tyler Frazier



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Author Details

Carson Woody
  • Human Geography Group, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, TN, USA
Tyler Frazier
  • Human Geography Group, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, TN, USA

Acknowledgements

This manuscript has been authored by UT-Battelle, LLC under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the U.S. Department of Energy. The United States Government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the United States Government retains a non-exclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, world-wide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for United States Government purposes. The Department of Energy will provide public access to these results of federally sponsored research in accordance with the DOE Public Access Plan (http://energy.gov/downloads/doe-public-access-plan).

Cite AsGet BibTex

Carson Woody and Tyler Frazier. Waffle Homes: Utilizing Aerial Imagery of Unfinished Buildings to Determine Average Room Size (Short Paper). In 12th International Conference on Geographic Information Science (GIScience 2023). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 277, pp. 85:1-85:6, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2023)
https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.GIScience.2023.85

Abstract

A primary function of the Population Density Tables Project (PDT) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory is to produce residential population densities per 1000 sq. ft. for each country and their associated first-level administrative units. This is accomplished by utilizing the average size of different types of dwelling areas (urban, rural, single-family, multi-family, etc.) and the average household size provided by a country’s Census or statistical bureau records. This data is available for the majority of Europe, North America, and large swathes of Asia, but is less easily found in Africa and South America. In these regions, Censuses generally report dwelling area by number of rooms, which poses the challenging question of how we can translate number of rooms to dwelling size when no dwelling size areas are available with which to compare. Using sub-meter resolution satellite imagery of Accra, Ghana, this challenge can be tackled using imagery of roofless buildings currently under construction that show the interior floor plan of the dwelling. A sample of buildings from the different neighborhoods of Accra can be digitized to provide an estimate and range of average room sizes of dwellings. This average room size can then be translated to a total dwelling area using the "number of rooms occupied by a household" variable from the Ghanaian Census. This intermediate step between average dwelling size and number of rooms occupied, fills the missing link that prevents PDT from continually producing new population densities for countries where dwelling size is unavailable through any official means.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Social and professional topics → Cultural characteristics
Keywords
  • Urban Analytics
  • Aerial Imagery
  • Satellite Imagery
  • Population Density
  • Human Geography
  • Africa
  • Residential Dwellings

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References

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