Estimating the number of buildings
In exercise 5 you have made an estimation of the percentage of each mapping unit covered by buildings with different number of stories. However, we are still missing one very important parameter: number of buildings. Unfortunately this cannot be obtained from the map Floor_nr. Due to the differences in the roofs, the fact that buildings with the same height are connected, the presence of trees which also give an altitude in the Lidar DEM, and inaccuracies of the Topo_DEM in comparison with the Lidar DEM, it is not possible to derive this by converting the raster map Floor_nr into unique ID polygons. The estimation of the number of buildings per mapping unit can be done in two ways:
• An accurate way is to actual count the number of buildings for all mapping unit from the high-resolution image. However, this would cost an enormous amount of time and is not very feasible.
• A less accurate way is to make a number of samples per mapping units for each landuse type and count the number of buildings. Then the average building size is calculated, and for those mapping units where no samples were taken these average building sizes are used in combination with the area of the mapping unit to estimate the number of buildings.
We will follow the second method here. The sampled mapping units are stored in the table Buildings_sampled.