Quantifying urban areas with multi-source data based on percolation theory

Abstract

Quantifying urban areas is crucial for addressing associated urban issues such as environmental and sustainable problems. Remote sensing data, especially the nighttime light images, have been widely used to delineate urbanized areas across the world. Meanwhile, some emerging urban data, such as volunteered geographical information (e.g., OpenStreetMap) and social sensing data (e.g., mobile phone and social media), have also shown great potential in revealing urban boundaries and dynamics. However, consistent and robust methods to quantify urban areas from these multi-source data have remained elusive. Here, we propose a percolation-based method to extract urban areas from these multi-source urban data. We derive the optimal urban/non-urban threshold by considering the critical nature of urban systems with the support of the percolation theory. Furthermore, we apply the method with three open-source datasets - population, road, and nighttime light - to 28 countries. We show that the proposed method captures the similar urban characteristics in terms of urban areas from multi-source data, and Zipf's law holds well in most countries. The accuracy of the derived urban areas by different datasets has been validated with the Landsat-based reference data in 10 cities, and the accuracy can be further improved through data fusion ($\kappa =0.69-0.85$, mean $\kappa =0.78$). Our study not only provides an efficient method to quantify urban areas with open-source data, but also deepens the understanding of urban systems and sheds some light on multi-source data fusion in geographical fields.

Accepted for publication in Remote Sensing of Environment

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• Power laws, Pareto distributions and Zipf's law
• Laws of Population Growth
• Modeling Urban Growth Patterns with Correlated Percolation
• Cities and Regions in Britain through hierarchical percolation
• Head/tail Breaks for Visualization of City Structure and Dynamics
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• Random site percolation thresholds on square lattice for complex neighborhoods containing sites up to the sixth coordination zone
• Universality of random-site percolation thresholds for two-dimensional complex non-compact neighborhoods
• The spectral dimension of human mobility
• Percolation analysis of spatiotemporal distribution of population in Seoul and Helsinki