This paper provides the first milestone in measuring the floor space of
buildings (that is, building footprint and height) and its evolution over time
for China. Doing so requires building on imagery that is of a
medium-fine-grained granularity, as longer cross-sections and time series data
across many cities are only available in such format. We use a multi-class
object segmenter approach to gauge the floor space of buildings in the same
framework: first, we determine whether a surface area is covered by buildings
(the square footage of occupied land); second, we need to determine the height
of buildings from their imagery. We then use Sentinel-1 and -2 satellite images
as our main data source. The benefits of these data are their large
cross-sectional and longitudinal scope plus their unrestricted accessibility.
We provide a detailed description of the algorithms used to generate the data
and the results. We analyze the preprocessing steps of reference data (if not
ground truth data) and their consequences for measuring the building floor
space. We also discuss the future steps in building a time series on urban
development based on our preliminary experimental results.

本研究运用多类目标分割算法结合 Sentinel-1 和 - 2 卫星数据，测量中国建筑物（即建筑物占地面积和高度）的楼板面积及其演变，旨在构建城市发展时间序列。