Fusion of Remote Sensing and Internet Data to Calculate Urban Floor Area Ratio

The floor area ratio is a comprehensive index that plays an important role in urban planning and sustainable development. Remote sensing data are widely used in floor area ratio calculations because they can produce both two-dimensional planar and three-dimensional stereo information on buildings. However, remote sensing is not adequate for calculating the number of floors in a building. In this paper, a simple and practical pixel-level model is established through defining a quantitative relationship among the floor area ratio, building density, and average number of floors (ANF). The floor area ratios are calculated by combining remote sensing data with publicly available Internet data. It incorporates supplemental map data and street-level views from Internet maps to confirm building types and the number of floors, thereby enabling more-accurate floor area ratio calculations. The proposed method is tested in the Tiantongyuan neighborhood, Changping District, Beijing, and the results show that it can accurately approximate the number of floors in buildings. Inaccuracies in the value of the floor area ratio were found to be primarily due to the uncertainties in building density calculations. After performing systematic error correction, the building density (BD) and floor area ratio were each calculated with the relative accuracy exceeding 90%. Moreover, the experiments verified that the fusion of internet map data with remote sensing data has innate advantages for floor area ratio calculations.