An Empirical Measurement of Lighting Technology Changeover in New York City with Deep Learning

Replacing inefficient lighting with energy-efficient alternatives is a proven way to reduce urban energy use, yet evaluating such policies remains challenging. For example, in 2013, New York City (NYC) initiated a program to replace 250,000 high-pressure sodium (HPS) streetlights with light-emitting diodes (LEDs) by 2017, but no subsequent evaluation was published. Here, we employ ground-based hyperspectral imaging (HSI; 0.4–1.0 microns, ∼850 bands) observations from the “Urban Observatory” (UO), obtained in 2013 and 2018, to quantitatively characterize this technological transition. Following co-registration, artifact removal, and source identification, we classified individual light source technologies using both a maximum correlation approach with spectral templates of known lighting types and a one-dimensional Convolutional Neural Network (1D-CNN) trained on 1321 manually labeled spectra, achieving an average precision of ∼92% for the 2013 data and ∼94% for the 2018 data across technology classes. Scene-level mixture modeling indicates a reduction in the HPS-to-LED brightness ratio from 1.15 (2013) to 0.27 (2018), demonstrating the capability of longitudinal HSI for evaluating urban lighting policy outcomes.