Background

AI for Earth Land Cover Mapping – Land use planning in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Background

AI for Earth Land Cover Mapping is an innovative, user-centric artificial intelligence (AI) tool developed for the Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) Planning Department in Vietnam. It helps urban planners make decisions aimed at tackling the city’s rapidly expanding key challenges related to traffic, infrastructure, environment, uncontrolled investments and new developments. In the past, the city’s data and information was fragmented, inaccessible and sometimes outdated. This resulted in a lack of planning cohesion for the city government and its stakeholders. AI for Earth Land Cover Mapping aims to solve this problem.

The HCMC Urban Planning Platform was developed as a first step to help the city face up to its challenges and to help local government take informed spatial planning decisions. The platform increases efficiency levels by digitalizing urban planning processes for the city. It uses remote sensing techniques to detect and classify objects from satellite images. It then vectorises the extracted data and stores it in a way that is accessible to everyone. Users can also provide feedback on the datasets.

The HCMC Urban Planning Platform is currently being enriched using artificial intelligence and deep learning technologies to create an ‘AI for Earth Land Cover Mapping tool’. The main goal here is to provide stakeholders with a tool that can be used to interactively classify land cover types from satellite imagery, provide automatic updates and maintenance processes as well as systematically and efficiently update data. The project is led by the Ho Chi Minh City Planning Department and the World Bank. Further partners include:

• Microsoft AI (company): Technical implementation and delivery of the Microsoft AI tool • Planet (company): Satellite imagery delivery and tool engineering • Airbus (company): Satellite imagery delivery • VLAB (start-up company, Vietnam): Innovative urban planning solutions • Singapore-ETH Centre (Campus for Research Excellence and

Technological Enterprise): Technical work delivery

The platform’s AI processes satellite images from different time periods based on the customer’s needs and the availability of satellite images. It then delivers detailed information about the land coverage and functionality of an area. Comparisons can be made on an annual, quarterly or monthly basis to monitor changes in the urban footprint, validate claims by the public, approve development requests and prevent uncontrolled urban sprawl and investments that conflict with local legislative policy. This results in a more transparent and efficient exchange of information regarding issues such as permissions, land use coverage, potential environmental risks for an area or current and future developments. This intuitive, user-centric and web-based tool allows public and private stakeholders to interact more closely with local authorities and the city’s planning processes.