$100,000 grant funds development of innovative approach to estimating population

BOWLING GREEN, O.—In the not-too-distant future, demographers may be able to estimate the population of urban areas through pictures taken by satellite, using software technology currently being developed in Bowling Green.

Dr. Robert Vincent, a Bowling Green State University professor of geology, and Dr. Jerry Wicks, a former BGSU sociology professor and now owner of Senecio Software Inc., have teamed up to devise remote sensing software that will automatically recognize and identify habitations and, using mathematical models, estimate population and housing in those areas.

The system, called Remote Estimates™, will combine high-resolution satellite imagery, multi-spectral analysis and demographic estimation techniques.

Senecio recently received a $100,000 National Institutes of Health Small Business Innovation Research award for the project, titled “Enhancing Digital Elevation Models for Population Research.”

Population estimates are based on census counts, administrative records such as building permits, and mathematical models to arrive at a current estimate. The new system would utilize a different approach, using visual sightings from satellite imagery with the housing unit method of estimation.

For businesses that need to know the most current population figures for an area, remote sensing could be very helpful, Wicks said, as administrative records can sometimes lag a couple of years before being fully recorded.

Already there has been interest in the project from the London School of Economics, which has received a grant from the World Health Organization to estimate the population of fast-growing slum areas in Third World countries. These areas can seemingly spring up overnight and their populations can be very difficult to estimate, Wicks said. Having up-to-date information could help governmental agencies better plan public health efforts and disease prevention programs.

The project represents the coming-together of both men’s longstanding research interests. Almost 20 years ago, Vincent developed a software program that is widely used by oil and gas companies to explore for oil by determining the elevation of each pixel of a digitized scanned picture of terrain. By identifying subtle differences in geological features, the location of potential oil sites can be determined.

Wicks is a demographer specializing in population studies who had been “harboring an idea for many years about using remote sensing to estimate population and housing,” he said. After retiring from BGSU four years ago, he and a business partner, Jose Tereira de Almeida, founded Senecio Software. The company specializes in the design of Java Web applications used in the collection and analysis of social, health and demographic research data.

Vincent and Wicks’s joint project involves, first, updating Vincent’s software to run on newer computers. Helping in this effort at Senecio is BGSU graduate student Jim Wilkerson.

“Our goal is to have it correctly ‘see’ an object and then identify it,” Wicks said. The next step is to automate the entire process. “This is a far more demanding task than the software has been called on to do so far,” Wicks said. “We’re pushing the limits to come up with a much more detailed picture of the urban landscape.”

The NIH funding, Vincent said, will provide the resources to enhance the software and automate the detection and classification of objects in an urban environment. (Posted August 13, 2002)