NYU Tandon builds FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) data infrastructure for urban monitoring

Urban infrastructure is constantly changing through weathering, deterioration, and repairs, yet the technology to track exactly what's happening to buildings and roads has remained frustratingly limited.

Now, a NYU Tandon-led research team with collaborators at the University of Delaware have received a grant from the National Science Foundation to build the missing data infrastructure that could help cities better monitor their built environments and identify problems earlier.

The project is called HS-SPECTRA (Hyperspectral Standardizing and Sharing Possibilities for Urban Conditions through Toolkits, Resources, and Archiving).

Hyperspectral imaging measures how light interacts with materials by recording how much light is reflected, absorbed, or transmitted at each wavelength across a broad spectrum. This process produces a unique signature for every material at its current condition. As such, the technique can reveal hidden moisture damage, structural repairs, and material deterioration invisible to the naked eye. But to use this technology effectively, researchers need reference databases showing what normal and damaged materials look like under real-world conditions.

Existing spectral libraries containing urban material signatures are extremely scarce and have no established standard for rigorous metadata, according to a review by Jessica Salcido and Debra Laefer published in the Photogrammetric Record.  Furthermore, most existing spectral libraries capture materials once, under idealized laboratory conditions, making those libraries incomplete and hard to use.

"We're creating something entirely new," said Laefer, the project's principal investigator and NYU Tandon professor of Civil and Urban Engineering and a faculty member of the Center for Urban Science + Progress (CUSP). "A living dataset that tracks the same materials repeatedly over time and under varying environmental conditions and temperatures."

The practical applications extend across multiple domains. Building inspectors could use the technology to identify structural repairs or detect moisture damage invisible to the naked eye. Urban planners might track how infrastructure weathers over time. Heritage conservators could monitor historic buildings for early signs of deterioration.

“You can look at a brick facade with your eyes and maybe notice some discoloration. But hyperspectral imaging can distinguish between original materials and patches, identify salt intrusion, and detect moisture retention,” said Salcido, an NYU Physics Ph.D candidate and a researcher on the project. “That information is critical for maintenance planning but impossible to see with conventional photography."

HS-SPECTRA will employ rooftop-mounted sensing platforms in Brooklyn at CUSP's Urban Observatory and at the University of Delaware. The one at NYU will provide persistent imaging of the Manhattan skyline, as the observatory has the capability to capture visible, infrared, and hyperspectral data at distances of one to four kilometers. The facility at the University of Delaware is led by Prof. Gregory Dobler, who is the co-principal investigator on this NSF grant.

The team will augment this existing infrastructure with additional weather and atmospheric sensors to fully contextualize how environmental conditions affect spectral measurements. Over the three-year, $600,000 project, they expect to generate approximately 102,000 individual spectra annually from multiple carefully selected regions of interest, capturing hourly data between 6 AM and 8 PM across all seasons.

"We're creating open-source tools and standards that will enable seamless conversion of our reference data to the research instruments owned and operated by other scientists and engineers around the world," Laefer explained, addressing that what sets HS-SPECTRA apart is making the data actually usable.

The project will do this by developing standardized metadata frameworks, processing pipelines, and automated archival workflows. All data will be released through established public repositories, SPECCHIO and EcoSIS, with scheduled releases linked by unified campaign identifiers. The team is also creating resampling software that will enable researchers to transform the spectral library to match specifications of various sensors, dramatically expanding the data's utility.

The project includes community engagement efforts, with case studies, training materials, and demonstrations targeted at the structural engineering, architecture, and historic preservation communities through professional conferences, webinars, and direct outreach to city agencies like NYC's Department of Buildings. By automating the data processing and archival pipeline, the team aims to ensure the urban spectral monitoring can continue well beyond the grant period, creating a lasting resource for researchers worldwide studying how cities evolve at the material level.

NSF's Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure and the Directorate for Engineering jointly support the project.