Combining deep learning and crowdsourcing geo-images to predict housing quality in rural China

Housing quality is an essential proxy for regional wealth, security and health. Understanding the distribution of housing quality is crucial for unveiling rural development status and providing political proposals. However, present rural house quality data highly depends on a top-down, time-consuming survey at the national or provincial level but fails to unpack the housing quality at the village level. To fill the gap between accurately depicting rural housing quality conditions and deficient data, we collect massive rural images and invite users to assess their housing quality at scale. As a result, 15,700 rural house images across 28 Chinese provinces are captured. Furthermore, a deep learning framework is proposed to automatically and efficiently predict housing quality based on crowd-sourcing rural images.