URBAN-SAT: UAV based multimodal remote sensing to assess heating and cooling demand in urban areas

As cities are trying to reduce energy consumption for the heating and cooling of buildings, systematically acquired information about building façades structures, thermal bridge, façade components and the material are of major interest.

The aim of the URBAN-SAT project is the integrated analysis of imagery from innovate small sized optical, thermal infrared and hyperspectral cameras acquired from unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). This offers the unique opportunity to extract information about façades automatically and with a high level of detail. The acquired information can be used to improve energy consumption estimates and release the potentiation for energy saving.

Sensor calibration has to be done on a geometric and radiometric level, while data fusion such as image registration needs to be performed to merge the three data sets. Radiometric correction and window reflections will be addressed as well. Classification of the building façades will be based on the geometry of façade elements, the material and the thermal radiation using extracted information from all cameras. In the end, the classification can be used for further applications, such as energy consumption estimates.

The spectral library called KLUM has been developed during the project that contains labelled urban materials and the corresponding spectral reflectance and metadata. The spectral library can be used for classification of façade material and is publicly available for the scientific community.