A Framework for Interpolating the Population Surface at the Residential-Housing-Unit Level

Population surface information is essential for a broad array of geographical studies. Many areal interpolation methods have been developed for creating population surface data from decennial census data. This paper describes a new framework to interpolate population to the lowest spatial level, i.e., housing units, based on high-resolution geospatial imagery. The framework is fundamentally a dasymetric mapping process, comprising: (1) determination of the basic dasymetric unit; (2) extracting the basic units; and (3) allocating population counts to each unit. An example was carried out to illustrate the promises and challenges of implementing such a framework using DOQQ, LIDAR, and parcel data.