Using social media data to map urban areas: ideas and limits

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Abstract
There is an increasing trend at using social media data to map human activity, to the point that some authors have suggested that these data may be even better than Earth Observation (EO) data to map urban areas. This work introduces a novel approach to map urban areas using SAR images from Sentinel-1 data, and exploiting either Twitter or Weibo data for two different cities, Beijing and Taipei. The use of different social media data results into different urban extent maps, and for different cities the same approach provides different accuracy values for the same area, according to the availability of either social media data set. Instead, urban extents obtained by means of EO data only are more stable. Indeed, the adoption of a specific social platform depends on a number of geographical, economic and political factors, while remote sensing is based on physics.

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