Atlas of Human Settlements

The Atlas of Human Settlements (AHS) is Atlas AI's collection of geospatial data layers that report where human settlements are, how densely they are built up and how they change over time. Atlas AI contrasts it with the open-access Global Human Settlement Layer, last updated in 2018, and describes AHS as the world's only commercial offering of its kind, with global coverage and annual updates.

AHS is produced by Atlas AI's computer-vision and machine-learning models, including continent-specific models, applied to Copernicus Sentinel-2 imagery at 10 m spatial resolution, with custom land-use/land-cover layers used to reduce false positives; annual layers are available from 2016 onward, with custom releases on demand. The fourth release contains a Built-up Surface map (binary presence in each 100 m² cell), a Built-up Index (the share of each 10 m cell covered by buildings), a vector Built-up Settlement map aggregated within a 50 m radius, and new Built-up Confidence, Settlement Density and Settlement Gradient layers. Atlas AI lists socio-economic settlement attributes including population, asset wealth, spending power and access to electricity. Its documentation describes the asset-wealth, spending and electrification layers at about 1 km resolution for Africa and South Asia, for years up to 2020, modelled from household surveys, Landsat imagery and VIIRS night-time lights.

Atlas AI names uses in infrastructure planning, consumer demand forecasting, supply-chain planning, tracking industrial change, mapping vulnerable communities and disaster response. In 2023 it released the AHS 2021 layers for Turkey and Syria under an open humanitarian licence after the earthquake. AHS data is available on Google Cloud Analytics Hub (BigQuery) and is shown in Atlas AI's Aperture web platform.