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Accurate and topical spatial datasets representing human populations are foundational to solving humanitarian issues. This paper provides unique solutions to accurately map human settlements both at scale and across remote areas. A method of village boundary extraction from very high resolution optical satellite imagery is proposed. Furthermore, the supplement of a crowd-sourced validation process to filter the detections for higher accuracy and the automated mosaic techniques are detailed. To demonstrate the computational and informational scalability of the process, four distinct geographic locations in Nigeria, Somalia, Pakistan, and Afghanistan were analyzed for a total processed area of 592 000 km 2 , comprised of 1159 high-resolution DigitalGlobe images. The geographic variability of the locations and the scale of the projects required dynamic and automated solutions, respectively. The curated results exhibit high recall and precision of human settlement data in remote as well as urban areas. Crowdsourced validation allows complete control over the precision of the final village boundary layer, and given time, an effective 100% precision can be achieved. This highly scalable and precise system is perfectly adequate for processing regional and country-scale areas, with minimal human effort.

The Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) successfully acquired terrain elevation data for 80 percent of the Earth’s landmass in February 2000. The radar system and data collection scheme designed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) met the global requirements of the U.S. Department of Defense for Level 2 Digital Terrain Elevation Data (DTED ® ). JPL processed the raw data into unfinished DTED ® 2 and other products that were delivered to two contractors of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. The contractors edited the unfinished DTED ® 2, updated the associated products, and generated finished products for distribution. Automated processes were developed by each contractor to identify, delineate and set heights for lakes, rivers, and ocean coastlines in conformance with an extensive set of editing rules created to maintain consistency and uniformity in the final products. The finished DTED ® is significantly better than the 16 m vertical accuracy required by the original specification.