Mapping Historic Urban Footprints in France: Balancing Quality, Scalability and AI Techniques

Abstract

Quantitative analysis of historical urban sprawl in France before the 1970s is hindered by the lack of nationwide digital urban footprint data. This study bridges this gap by developing a scalable deep learning pipeline to extract urban areas from the Scan Histo historical map series (1925-1950), which produces the first open-access, national-scale urban footprint dataset for this pivotal period. Our key innovation is a dual-pass U-Net approach designed to handle the high radiometric and stylistic complexity of historical maps. The first pass, trained on an initial dataset, generates a preliminary map that identifies areas of confusion, such as text and roads, to guide targeted data augmentation. The second pass uses a refined dataset and the binarized output of the first model to minimize radiometric noise, which significantly reduces false positives. Deployed on a high-performance computing cluster, our method processes 941 high-resolution tiles covering the entirety of metropolitan France. The final mosaic achieves an overall accuracy of 73%, effectively capturing diverse urban patterns while overcoming common artifacts like labels and contour lines. We openly release the code, training datasets, and the resulting nationwide urban raster to support future research in long-term urbanization dynamics.