Point-to-Region Co-learning for Poverty Mapping at High Resolution Using Satellite Imagery

Zhili Li, Yiqun Xie, Xiaowei Jia, Kara Stuart, Caroline Delaire, Sergii Skakun

Abstract: Despite improvements in safe water and sanitation services in low-income countries, a substantial proportion of the population in Africa still does not have access to these essential services. Up-to-date fine-scale maps of low-income settlements are urgently needed by authorities to improve service provision. We aim to develop a cost-effective solution to generate fine-scale maps of these vulnerable populations using multi-source public information. The problem is challenging as ground-truth maps are available at only a limited number of cities, and the patterns are heterogeneous across cities. Recent attempts tackling the spatial heterogeneity issue focus on scenarios where true labels partially exist for each input region, which are unavailable for the present problem. We propose a dynamic point-to-region co-learning framework to learn heterogeneity patterns that cannot be reflected by point-level information and generalize deep learners to new areas with no labels. We also propose an attention-based correction layer to remove spurious signatures, and a region-gate to capture both region-invariant and variant patterns. Experiment results on real-world fine-scale data in three cities of Kenya show that the proposed approach can largely improve model performance on various base network architectures.