Laser-scanning derived 3D information for estimating population in the presence of high-rise residential buildings

This work proposes an alternative method to estimate urban population in the central area of Uberlandia city, located in Minas Gerais State, southeast of Brazil, using the volume of single houses and high-rise residential buildings, obtained from IKONOS-II images and LiDAR data. In the first stage, the residential buildings borders were extracted by digitalization executed on the orthoimage, and a height digital model was derived from LiDAR data. In the second stage, estimates of population within each census district of the study area for the year 2004 were accomplished by means of the calculated residential volume, habitable surface, and population density. This calculation proved that the estimated population can be considered equivalent to the population provided by the reference data at a 1% level of significance.