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Extracting building footprints from high-resolution imagery is a challenging task. Fortunately we now have access to ready-to-use building footprints dataset extracted using state-of-the-art ML techniques. Google’s Open Buildings project has mapped and extracted 1.8 billion buildings in Africa, South Asia, South-East Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. Microsoft’s Global ML Building Footprints project has made over 1.24 billion building footprints available from most regions of the world.

Given the availability of these datasets, we can now analyze them to create derivative products. In this post, we will learn how to access these datasets and compute the aggregate count of buildings within a regular grid using Google Earth Engine. We will then export the grid as a shapefile and create a building density map in QGIS.

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In this article, I will outline a method for extracting shoreline from satellite images in Google Earth Engine. This method is scalable and automatically extracts the coastline as a vector polyline. The full code link is available at the end of the post.

The method involves the following steps

  1. Create a Cloud-free Composite Image
  2. Extract All Waterbodies
  3. Remove Inland Water and Small Islands
  4. Convert Raster to Vector
  5. Simplify and Extract Coastline

We will go through the details of each step and review the Google Earth Engine API code required to achieve the results.

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If you are like me, you have a lot of assets uploaded to Earth Engine. As you upload more and more assets, managing this data becomes quite a cumbersome task. Earth Engine provides a handy Command-Line Tool that helps with asset management. While the command-line tool is very useful, it falls short when it comes to bulk data management tasks.

What if you want to rename an ImageCollection? You will need to manually move each child image to a new collection. If you wanted to delete assets matching certain keywords, you’ll need to write a custom shell script. If you are running low on your asset quota and want to delete large assets, there is no direct way to list large assets. Fortunately, the Earth Engine Python Client API comes with a handy ee.data module that we can leverage to write custom scripts. In this post, I will cover the following use cases with full python scripts that can be used by anyone to manage their assets:

  • How to get a list of all your assets (including folders/sub-folders/collections)
  • How to find the quota consumed by each asset and find large assets
  • How to rename ImageCollections

The post explains each use-case with code snippets. If you want to just grab the scripts, they are linked at the end of the post.

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Many applications require replacing missing pixels in an image with an interpolated value from its temporal neighbours. This gap-filling technique is used in several applications, including:

  • Replacing Cloudy Pixels: You may want to fill gap in an image with the best-estimated value from the before and after cloud-free pixel.
  • Estimating Intermediate Values: You can use this technique to compute an image for a previously unknown time-step. If you had population rasters at 2 different years and want to compute a population raster for an intermediate year using pixel-wise linear interpolation.
  • Preparing Data for Regression: All of your independent variables may not be available at the same temporal resolution. You can harmonize various dataset by generating interpolated raster at uniform or fixed time-steps.

Google Earth Engine can be used effectively for gap-filling time-series datasets. While the logic for linear interpolation is fairly straightforward, data preparation for this in GEE can be quite challenging. It involves use of Joins, Masks and Advanced Filters. This post explains the steps with code snippets and builds a fully functioning script that can be applied on any time-series data.

You can also watch my video at Geo for Good 2022 Conference where I covered the same topic.

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Most optical satellite imagery products come with one or more QA-bands that allows the user to assess quality of each pixel and extract pixels that meet their requirements. The most common application for QA-bands is to extract information about cloudy pixels and mask them. But the QA bands contain a wealth of other information that can help you remove low quality data from your analysis. Typically the information contained in QA bands is stored as Bitwise Flags. In this post, I will cover basic concepts related to Bitwise operations and how to extract and mask with specific quality indicators using Bitmasks.

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In this post, I will outline techniques for computing weighted-centroids in both QGIS and Google Earth Engine. For a polygon feature, the centroid is the geometric center. It can also be thought of as the average coordinate of all points within the polygon. There are some uses cases where you may want to compute a weighted-centroid where some parts of the polygon gets higher ‘weight’ than others. The main use-case is to calculate a population-weighted centroid. One can also use Night Lights data as a proxy for urbanized population and calculate a nightlights-weighted centroid. Some applications include:

  • Regional Planning: Locate the population-weighted centroid to know the most accessible location from the region.
  • Network Analysis: For generating demand points in location-allocation analysis, you need to convert demands from regions to points. It preferable to compute populated-weighted centroids for a more accurate analysis.

Do check out this twitter-thread by Raj Bhagat P for more discussion on weighted centroids.

Different Weighted Centroids for the State of Karnataka, India (2015)
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Many useful climate and weather datasets come as gridded rasters. The techniques for working with them is slightly different than other remote sensing datasets. In this post, I will show how to work with gridded rainfall data in Google Earth Engine. This post also serves an an example of how to use the map/reduce programming style to efficiently work with such large datasets.

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Color correction is an important process working with satellite and aerial imagery. A common technique used to balance the colors across multiple images is Histogram Matching. While the algorithm has been around for a long time, there aren’t many free and open-source tools that can used at scale. Mapbox has released an open-source tool called rio-hist that works well for small and medium sized images. Whitebox Tools has a Histogram Matching algorithm that can be used in QGIS via Whitebox Tools Processing Plugin. But when working with large mosaics, such as the ones used in this post – it runs out of memory or takes a very long time. Google Earth Engine is a good alternative to perform fast histogram matching across large images.

In this post, I will first give an overview of the histogram matching algorithm and then show you how it can be implemented in Earth Engine. The example images are large high resolution orthomosaics (3cm/pixel resolution) collected by UAV around Oakland, CA area.

Source Images: © Dan Koopman, Downloaded from OpenAerialMap
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