Neighbor-aware informal settlement mapping with graph convolutional networks

Abstract

Mapping informal settlements is crucial for addressing challenges related to urban planning, public health, and infrastructure in rapidly growing cities. Geospatial machine learning has emerged as a key tool for detecting and mapping these areas from remote sensing data. However, existing approaches often treat spatial units independently, neglecting the relational structure of the urban fabric. We propose a graph-based framework that explicitly incorporates local geographical context into the classification process. Each spatial unit (cell) is embedded in a graph structure along with its adjacent neighbors, and a lightweight Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) is trained to classify whether the central cell belongs to an informal settlement. Experiments are conducted on a case study in Rio de Janeiro using spatial cross-validation across five distinct zones, ensuring robustness and generalizability across heterogeneous urban landscapes. Our method outperforms standard baselines, improving Kappa coefficient by 17 points over individual cell classification. We also show that graph-based modeling surpasses simple feature concatenation of neighboring cells, demonstrating the benefit of encoding spatial structure for urban scene understanding.