arXiv subjects

Tongshu Zheng

Publications and source records attributed to Tongshu Zheng.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Seeing SDG 6 from space: local-scale monitoring of piped water and sewage systems across Africa using satellite imagery and self-supervised learning

Access to drinking water and sanitation is essential, yet monitoring progress toward Sustainable Development Goal 6 remains constrained by costly, infrequent, and spatially uneven household surveys, particularly in data-scarce regions. We develop a scalable remote-sensing framework to estimate the area-level presence of piped water and sewage systems across Africa at 2.56 km resolution. The framework combines Sentinel-2 imagery, enumerator-observed system-presence records from Afrobarometer enumeration areas, 30 m population data, and Vision Transformer representations learned through DINO self-supervised learning. On held-out enumeration areas, the best models achieve AUROCs of 91.54% for piped water and 93.24% for sewage. Under leave-one-region-out cross-validation, performance declines to 75.5% and 78.7%, respectively, indicating challenges in transferring models to unsampled regions. Applied across 50 African countries, population-weighted estimates closely track WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme benchmarks for piped water access ($R^2 = 0.92$) and show meaningful agreement with safely managed sanitation for sewage ($R^2 = 0.72$). In countries without Afrobarometer coverage, population-weighted mean absolute errors are 9.5% for piped water and 10.7% for sewage. Predictions for 767 Local Government Areas in Nigeria reveal substantial subnational inequality: in the most affected areas, as many as 1.187 million people live where no piped water system is present and 1.577 million where no sewage system is present. These findings show that self-supervised learning with freely available satellite imagery can complement household surveys and support SDG 6 monitoring, infrastructure planning, and environmental equity assessment.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Assessing the Potential of PlanetScope Satellite Imagery to Estimate Particulate Matter Oxidative Potential

Oxidative potential (OP), which measures particulate matter's (PM) capacity to induce oxidative stress in the lungs, is increasingly recognized as an indicator of PM toxicity. Since OP is not routinely monitored, it can be challenging to estimate exposure and health impacts. Remote sensing data are commonly used to estimate PM mass concentration, but have never been used to estimate OP. In this study, we evaluate the potential of satellite images to estimate OP as measured by acellular ascorbic acid (OP AA) and dithiothreitol (OP DTT) assays of 24-hour PM10 sampled periodically over five years at three locations around Grenoble, France. We use a deep convolutional neural network to extract features of daily 3 m/pixel PlanetScope satellite images and train a multilayer perceptron to estimate OP at a 1 km spatial resolution based on the image features and common meteorological variables. The model captures more than half of the variation in OP AA and almost half of the variation in OP DTT (test set R2 = 0.62 and 0.48, respectively), with relative mean absolute error (MAE) of about 32%. Using only satellite images, the model still captures about half of the variation in OP AA and one third of the variation in OP DTT (test set R2 = 0.49 and 0.36, respectively) with relative MAE of about 37%. If confirmed in other areas, our approach could represent a low-cost method for expanding the temporal or spatial coverage of OP estimates.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Incorporating Prior Knowledge into Neural Networks through an Implicit Composite Kernel

It is challenging to guide neural network (NN) learning with prior knowledge. In contrast, many known properties, such as spatial smoothness or seasonality, are straightforward to model by choosing an appropriate kernel in a Gaussian process (GP). Many deep learning applications could be enhanced by modeling such known properties. For example, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are frequently used in remote sensing, which is subject to strong seasonal effects. We propose to blend the strengths of deep learning and the clear modeling capabilities of GPs by using a composite kernel that combines a kernel implicitly defined by a neural network with a second kernel function chosen to model known properties (e.g., seasonality). We implement this idea by combining a deep network and an efficient mapping based on the Nystrom approximation, which we call Implicit Composite Kernel (ICK). We then adopt a sample-then-optimize approach to approximate the full GP posterior distribution. We demonstrate that ICK has superior performance and flexibility on both synthetic and real-world data sets. We believe that ICK framework can be used to include prior information into neural networks in many applications.

cs.LG↗