Deep Umbra: A Generative Approach for Sunlight Access Computation in Urban Spaces
Figure: Overview the different components in the Deep Umbra framework.
Abstract
Sunlight and shadow play critical roles in how urban spaces are utilized, thrive, and grow. While access to sunlight is essential to the success of urban environment, shadows can provide shaded places to stay during the hot seasons, mitigate heat island effect, and increase pedestrian comfort levels. Properly quantifying sunlight access and shadows in large urban environments is key in tackling some of the important challenges facing cities today. In this paper, we propose Deep Umbra, a novel computational framework that enables the quantification of sunlight access and shadows at a global scale. Our framework is based on a conditional generative adversarial network that considers the physical form of cities to compute high-resolution spatial information of accumulated sunlight access for the different seasons of the year. We use data from seven different cities to train our model, and show, through an extensive set of experiments, its low overall RMSE (below 0.1) as well as its extensibility to cities that were not part of the training set. Additionally, we contribute a set of case studies and a comprehensive dataset with sunlight access information for more than 100 cities across six continents of the world. Deep Umbra is available at urbantk.org/shadows
Sunlight and shadow play critical roles in how urban spaces are utilized, thrive, and grow. While access to sunlight is essential to the success of urban environment, shadows can provide shaded places to stay during the hot seasons, mitigate heat island effect, and increase pedestrian comfort levels. Properly quantifying sunlight access and shadows in large urban environments is key in tackling some of the important challenges facing cities today. In this paper, we propose Deep Umbra, a novel computational framework that enables the quantification of sunlight access and shadows at a global scale. Our framework is based on a conditional generative adversarial network that considers the physical form of cities to compute high-resolution spatial information of accumulated sunlight access for the different seasons of the year. We use data from seven different cities to train our model, and show, through an extensive set of experiments, its low overall RMSE (below 0.1) as well as its extensibility to cities that were not part of the training set. Additionally, we contribute a set of case studies and a comprehensive dataset with sunlight access information for more than 100 cities across six continents of the world. Deep Umbra is available at urbantk.org/shadows
@article{omar2024deep,title={Deep Umbra: A Generative Approach for Sunlight Access Computation in Urban Spaces},doi={https://doi.org/10.1109/TBDATA.2024.3382964},author={Omar, Kazi Shahrukh and Moreira, Gustavo and Hodczak, Daniel and Hosseini, Maryam and Colaninno, Nicola and Lage, Marcos and Miranda, Fabio},journal={IEEE Transactions on Big Data},year={2024},}
Deep Umbra: A Generative Approach for Sunlight Access Computation in Urban SpacesIEEE Transactions on Big Data, 2024