Roofpedia

Roofpedia – Mapping Roofscapes with AI

Explore Sustainable Roofscapes Around the World

Roofpedia is an open registry of sustainable roofscapes around the world. It uses deep convolutional neural network to detect sustainable roof typologies from satellite images. Footprints of buildings identified with solar panels or rooftop greenery are tagged automatically, and the results are visualized above.

The Roofpedia Index

The Roofpedia Index is a measure of the penetration of sustainable roof typologies in major cities around the world. Solar roofs and Green roofs mapped by Roofpedia are compared against the total number of buildings and areas of the buildings in a city. Aggregate scores are calculated for both solar and green coverage and cities are ranked with an combined score.

The results are given in the table below. You may click on cities to visit them on map.

Rank	City	Buildings	Solar Roofs	%SR Count	%SR Area	Solar Score	Green Roofs	%GR Count	%GR Area	Green Score	Overall Score
1	Zurich	18440	838	4.5	12.9	86	5760	31.2	41.6	100	93
2	Berlin	28677	809	2.8	11.3	61	3899	13.6	24.8	51	56
3	Las Vegas	20389	805	3.9	17.3	93	192	0.9	7.8	9	51
4	Phoenix	15217	576	3.8	14.1	81	245	1.6	9.9	13	47
5	Melbourne	16809	486	2.9	17.3	81	258	1.5	8.4	11	46
6	New York	34385	677	2.0	9.4	46	1924	5.6	17.2	28	37
7	Copenhagen	15505	354	2.3	9.0	48	735	4.7	13.1	22	35
8	Paris	74014	1507	2.0	9.1	45	2766	3.7	11.2	18	32
9	San Diego	28303	237	0.8	7.4	27	373	1.3	11.0	14	20
10	Los Angeles	50978	384	0.8	6.3	22	419	0.8	4.7	6	14
11	San Jose	182314	732	0.4	4.9	14	2650	1.5	10.2	13	13
12	Seattle	81044	263	0.3	5.4	15	347	0.4	5.6	6	10
13	Portland	122900	482	0.4	4.2	11	302	0.2	3.7	3	7
14	San Francisco	165814	560	0.3	3.9	10	389	0.2	2.6	2	6
15	Vancouver	163818	145	0.1	1.6	0	108	0.1	1.0	0	0

Disclaimer: Vancouver is green! Just not roof green compared to the top cities in the list.

More cities are getting added to Roofpedia as their satellite data become available. If you’d like to contribute satellite images to expand Roofpedia, please email Abraham Noah Wu, the lead developer.

Data and code

Full data and code of Roofpedia can be accessed at its GitHub repo.

Paper and attribution

A preprint of the paper describing the project can be found on arXiv.

If you use Roofpedia in a scientific context, please cite the paper:

@misc{wu2020roofpedia,
  title={Roofpedia: Automatic mapping of green and solar roofs for an open roofscape registry and evaluation of urban sustainability}, 
  author={Abraham Noah Wu and Filip Biljecki},
  year={2020},
  eprint={2012.14349},
  archivePrefix={arXiv},
  primaryClass={cs.CY}
}

Acknowledgements

This research is part of the project Large-scale 3D Geospatial Data for Urban Analytics, which is supported by the National University of Singapore under the Start-Up Grant R-295-000-171-133.