remote sensing Article A Method for the Estimation of Finely-Grained Temporal Spatial Human Population Density Distributions Based on Cell Phone Call Detail Records Guangyuan Zhang 1, Xiaoping Rui 2,* , Stefan Poslad 1, Xianfeng Song 3 , Yonglei Fan 3 and Bang Wu 1 1 School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, Queen Mary University of London, London E1 4NS, UK;
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[email protected] Received: 10 June 2020; Accepted: 8 August 2020; Published: 10 August 2020 Abstract: Estimating and mapping population distributions dynamically at a city-wide spatial scale, including those covering suburban areas, has profound, practical, applications such as urban and transportation planning, public safety warning, disaster impact assessment and epidemiological modelling, which benefits governments, merchants and citizens. More recently, call detail record (CDR) of mobile phone data has been used to estimate human population distributions. However, there is a key challenge that the accuracy of such a method is difficult to validate because there is no ground truth data for the dynamic population density distribution in time scales such as hourly. In this study, we present a simple and accurate method to generate more finely grained temporal-spatial population density distributions based upon CDR data. We designed an experiment to test our method based upon the use of a deep convolutional generative adversarial network (DCGAN).