Urban Visual Intelligence: Studying Cities with AI and Street-level Imagery
Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；Nanjing Normal University（南京师范大学）；Peking University（北京大学）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）
Fan Zhang, Arianna Salazar Miranda, Fábio Duarte, Lawrence Vale, Gary Hack, Min Chen, Yu Liu, Michael Batty, Carlo Ratti
The visual dimension of cities has been a fundamental subject in urban studies, since the pioneering work of scholars such as Sitte, Lynch, Arnheim, and Jacobs. Several decades later, big data and artificial intelligence (AI) are revolutionizing how people move, sense, and interact with cities. This paper reviews the literature on the appearance and function of cities to illustrate how visual information has been used to understand them. A conceptual framework, Urban Visual Intelligence, is introduced to systematically elaborate on how new image data sources and AI techniques are reshaping the way researchers perceive and measure cities, enabling the study of the physical environment and its interactions with socioeconomic environments at various scales. The paper argues that these new approaches enable researchers to revisit the classic urban theories and themes, and potentially help cities create environments that are more in line with human behaviors and aspirations in the digital age.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）
The classification of streets on road networks has been focused on the vehicular transportational features of streets such as arterials, major roads, minor roads and so forth based on their transportational use. City authorities on the other hand have been shifting to more urban inclusive planning of streets, encompassing the side use of a street combined with the transportational features of a street. In such classification schemes, streets are labeled for example as commercial throughway, residential neighborhood, park etc. This modern approach to urban planning has been adopted by major cit…
Designing streetscapes from street-view imagery using diffusion models
Department of Urban and Regional Planning, University of Florida（城市与区域规划系，佛罗里达大学）；Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology Centre (SMART)（新加坡-麻省理工联合研究中心（SMART））；Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning, Texas A&M University（景观建筑与城市规划系，德克萨斯大学安德森分校）；Department of Agronomy, University of Florida（农业系，佛罗里达大学）
"People want an authority to tell them how to value things. But they chose this authority not based on facts or results. They chose it because it seems authoritative and familiar." - The Big Short The pavement condition index is one such a familiar measure used by many US cities to measure street quality and justify billions of dollars spent every year on street repair. These billion-dollar decisions are based on evaluation criteria that are subjective and not representative. In this paper, we build upon our initial submission to D4GX 2015 that approaches this problem of information asymmetry …
University of Melbourne（墨尔本大学）；University of the Sunshine Coast（阳光海岸大学）
The confluence of recent advances in availability of geospatial information, computing power, and artificial intelligence offers new opportunities to understand how and where our cities differ or are alike. Departing from a traditional `top-down' analysis of urban design features, this project analyses millions of images of urban form (consisting of street view, satellite imagery, and street maps) to find shared characteristics. A (novel) neural network-based framework is trained with imagery from the largest 1692 cities in the world and the resulting models are used to compare within-city loc…
Major decisions from governments and other large organizations rely on measurements of the populace's well-being, but making such measurements at a broad scale is expensive and thus infrequent in much of the developing world. We propose an inexpensive, scalable, and interpretable approach to predict key livelihood indicators from public crowd-sourced street-level imagery. Such imagery can be cheaply collected and more frequently updated compared to traditional surveying methods, while containing plausibly relevant information for a range of livelihood indicators. We propose two approaches to l…
TU Delft（代尔夫特理工大学）；TU Eindhoven（埃因霍温理工大学）；Cyclomedia B.V（Cyclomedia公司）
The current paradigm in privacy protection in street-view images is to detect and blur sensitive information. In this paper, we propose a framework that is an alternative to blurring, which automatically removes and inpaints moving objects (e.g. pedestrians, vehicles) in street-view imagery. We propose a novel moving object segmentation algorithm exploiting consistencies in depth across multiple street-view images that are later combined with the results of a segmentation network. The detected moving objects are removed and inpainted with information from other views, to obtain a realistic out…
BuildingView: Constructing Urban Building Exteriors Databases with Street View Imagery and Multimodal Large Language Mode
Thrust of Urban Governance and Design, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州）城市治理与设计中心）；Spatial Sciences Institute, University of Southern California（南加州大学空间科学学院）
We present DeepNav, a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based algorithm for navigating large cities using locally visible street-view images. The DeepNav agent learns to reach its destination quickly by making the correct navigation decisions at intersections. We collect a large-scale dataset of street-view images organized in a graph where nodes are connected by roads. This dataset contains 10 city graphs and more than 1 million street-view images. We propose 3 supervised learning approaches for the navigation task and show how A* search in the city graph can be used to generate supervision …
Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）；Google（谷歌）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）
The interactions of individuals with city neighbourhoods is determined, in part, by the perceived quality of urban environments. Perceived neighbourhood quality is a core component of urban vitality, influencing social cohesion, sense of community, safety, activity and mental health of residents. Large-scale assessment of perceptions of neighbourhood quality was pioneered by the Place Pulse projects. Researchers demonstrated the efficacy of crowd-sourcing perception ratings of image pairs across 56 cities and training a model to predict perceptions from street-view images. Variation across cit…
University College London（伦敦大学学院）；Google Inc.（谷歌公司）
We present a neural network model - based on CNNs, RNNs and a novel attention mechanism - which achieves 84.2% accuracy on the challenging French Street Name Signs (FSNS) dataset, significantly outperforming the previous state of the art (Smith'16), which achieved 72.46%. Furthermore, our new method is much simpler and more general than the previous approach. To demonstrate the generality of our model, we show that it also performs well on an even more challenging dataset derived from Google Street View, in which the goal is to extract business names from store fronts. Finally, we study the sp…
ADAPT Centre（ADAPT中心）；School of Computer Science and Statistics, Trinity College Dublin（都柏林圣三一大学计算机科学与统计学学院）
Many applications such as autonomous navigation, urban planning and asset monitoring, rely on the availability of accurate information about objects and their geolocations. In this paper we propose to automatically detect and compute the GPS coordinates of recurring stationary objects of interest using street view imagery. Our processing pipeline relies on two fully convolutional neural networks: the first segments objects in the images while the second estimates their distance from the camera. To geolocate all the detected objects coherently we propose a novel custom Markov Random Field model…
Efficient Cross-Country Data Acquisition Strategy for ADAS via Street-View Imagery
CARIAD SE；Karlsruhe Institute of Technology（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院）；Esslingen University of Applied Sciences（埃森哲应用科学大学）；FZI Research Center for Information Technology（弗劳恩霍夫信息技术研究中心）
Recognizing arbitrary multi-character text in unconstrained natural photographs is a hard problem. In this paper, we address an equally hard sub-problem in this domain viz. recognizing arbitrary multi-digit numbers from Street View imagery. Traditional approaches to solve this problem typically separate out the localization, segmentation, and recognition steps. In this paper we propose a unified approach that integrates these three steps via the use of a deep convolutional neural network that operates directly on the image pixels. We employ the DistBelief implementation of deep neural networks…
In this paper we aim to determine the location and orientation of a ground-level query image by matching to a reference database of overhead (e.g. satellite) images. For this task we collect a new dataset with one million pairs of street view and overhead images sampled from eleven U.S. cities. We explore several deep CNN architectures for cross-domain matching -- Classification, Hybrid, Siamese, and Triplet networks. Classification and Hybrid architectures are accurate but slow since they allow only partial feature precomputation. We propose a new loss function which significantly improves th…
The use of video surveillance in public spaces -- both by government agencies and by private citizens -- has attracted considerable attention in recent years, particularly in light of rapid advances in face-recognition technology. But it has been difficult to systematically measure the prevalence and placement of cameras, hampering efforts to assess the implications of surveillance on privacy and public safety. Here, we combine computer vision, human verification, and statistical analysis to estimate the spatial distribution of surveillance cameras. Specifically, we build a camera detection mo…
A Satellite Imagery Dataset for Long-Term Sustainable Development in United States Cities
University of Helsinki（赫尔辛基大学）；Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology (BNRist)（北京信息科学与技术国家研究中心（BNRist））；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
Space2Ground 2.0: A Multi-Source Dataset and Framework for Agricultural Monitoring through Fusion of Street-Level and Satellite Imagery
Operational Unit BEYOND Centre, IAASARS, National Observatory of Athens（雅典国家天文台IAASARS研究所BEYOND中心业务单元）；DHI Water & Environment（DHI水环境公司）；Artificial Intelligence Group, Wageningen University & Research（瓦赫宁根大学及研究中心人工智能组）
Cross-Modal Urban Sensing: Evaluating Sound-Vision Alignment Across Street-Level and Aerial Imagery
Department of Geography, University of South Carolina（南卡罗来纳大学地理系）；Department of Environmental Sciences, Emory University（埃默里大学环境科学系）；University of Canterbury（坎特伯雷大学）；School of Resource and Environmental Sciences, Wuhan University（武汉大学资源与环境科学学院）
Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）
This paper presents a new approach for synthesizing a novel street-view panorama given an overhead satellite image. Taking a small satellite image patch as input, our method generates a Google's omnidirectional street-view type panorama, as if it is captured from the same geographical location as the center of the satellite patch. Existing works tackle this task as an image generation problem which adopts generative adversarial networks to implicitly learn the cross-view transformations, while ignoring the domain relevance. In this paper, we propose to explicitly establish the geometric corres…
Studies evaluating bikeability usually compute spatial indicators shaping cycling conditions and conflate them in a quantitative index. Much research involves site visits or conventional geospatial approaches, and few studies have leveraged street view imagery (SVI) for conducting virtual audits. These have assessed a limited range of aspects, and not all have been automated using computer vision (CV). Furthermore, studies have not yet zeroed in on gauging the usability of these technologies thoroughly. We investigate, with experiments at a fine spatial scale and across multiple geographies (S…
Examining the Commitments and Difficulties Inherent in Multimodal Foundation Models for Street View Imagery
Guanghua School of Management, Peking University（北京大学光华管理学院）；The Bartlett School of Sustainable Construction, University College London（伦敦大学学院巴特lett可持续建筑学院）；School of Architecture, Tsinghua University（清华大学建筑学院）；School of Computing, The University of Georgia（佐治亚大学计算学院）；Department of Geography, University College London（伦敦大学学院地理系）；Department of Geography and the Environment, University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校地理与环境系）
Search with local intent is becoming increasingly useful due to the popularity of the mobile device. The creation and maintenance of accurate listings of local businesses worldwide is time consuming and expensive. In this paper, we propose an approach to automatically discover businesses that are visible on street level imagery. Precise business store front detection enables accurate geo-location of businesses, and further provides input for business categorization, listing generation, etc. The large variety of business categories in different countries makes this a very challenging problem. M…
Accurately maintaining digital street maps is labor-intensive. To address this challenge, much work has studied automatically processing geospatial data sources such as GPS trajectories and satellite images to reduce the cost of maintaining digital maps. An end-to-end map update system would first process geospatial data sources to extract insights, and second leverage those insights to update and improve the map. However, prior work largely focuses on the first step of this pipeline: these map extraction methods infer road networks from scratch given geospatial data sources (in effect creatin…
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；IBM Research Europe（IBM欧洲研究院）；IBM Europe（IBM欧洲）
Current methods to determine the energy efficiency of buildings require on-site visits of certified energy auditors which makes the process slow, costly, and geographically incomplete. To accelerate the identification of promising retrofit targets on a large scale, we propose to estimate building energy efficiency from widely available and remotely sensed data sources only, namely street view, aerial view, footprint, and satellite-borne land surface temperature (LST) data. After collecting data for almost 40,000 buildings in the United Kingdom, we combine these data sources by training multipl…
Beyond Geo-localization: Fine-grained Orientation of Street-view Images by Cross-view Matching with Satellite Imagery with Supplementary Materials
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Institute for Infocomm Research, A*STAR（新加坡科技研究局资讯通信研究院）；Grab Chronos S.R.L.（Grab Chronos有限责任公司）；Grabtaxi Holdings Pte. Ltd.（Grab出租车控股私人有限公司）
Study of urban form is an important area of research in urban planning/design that contributes to our understanding of how cities function and evolve. However, classical approaches are based on very limited observations and inconsistent methods. As an alternative, availability of massive urban data collections such as Open Street Map from the one hand and the recent advancements in machine learning methods such as deep learning techniques on the other have opened up new possibilities to automatically investigate urban forms at the global scale. In this work for the first time, by collecting a …
DM-KG: A Novel Method for Boosting Spatial Cognition of Vision-Language Models in Street View Imagery
Institute of Surveying and Mapping, Information Engineering University（信息工程大学测绘学院）；Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院地理科学与资源研究所）
Recov-Vision: Linking Street View Imagery and Vision-Language Models for Post-Disaster Recovery
UrbanResilience.AI Lab（UrbanResilience.AI 实验室）；Zachry Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering（Zachry 土木与环境工程系）；Texas A&M University（德克萨斯A&M大学）；Department of Earth, Marine and Environmental Sciences（地球、海洋与环境科学系）；The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill（北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校）
University of Bristol（布里斯托大学）；Toshiba Europe Ltd.（东芝欧洲有限公司）
Data-enabled cities are recently accelerated and enhanced with automated learning for improved Smart Cities applications. In the context of an Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem, the data communication is frequently costly, inefficient, not scalable and lacks security. Federated Learning (FL) plays a pivotal role in providing privacy-preserving and communication efficient Machine Learning (ML) frameworks. In this paper we evaluate the feasibility of FL in the context of a Smart Cities Street Light Monitoring application. FL is evaluated against benchmarks of centralised and (fully) personalise…
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Renmin University of China（中国人民大学）
Understanding intrinsic patterns and predicting spatiotemporal characteristics of cities require a comprehensive representation of urban neighborhoods. Existing works relied on either inter- or intra-region connectivities to generate neighborhood representations but failed to fully utilize the informative yet heterogeneous data within neighborhoods. In this work, we propose Urban2Vec, an unsupervised multi-modal framework which incorporates both street view imagery and point-of-interest (POI) data to learn neighborhood embeddings. Specifically, we use a convolutional neural network to extract …
Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学）；Eindhoven University of Technology（埃因霍温理工大学）；Cyclomedia Technology B.V（Cyclomedia科技有限公司）
Object detection and classification of traffic signs in street-view imagery is an essential element for asset management, map making and autonomous driving. However, some traffic signs occur rarely and consequently, they are difficult to recognize automatically. To improve the detection and classification rates, we propose to generate images of traffic signs, which are then used to train a detector/classifier. In this research, we present an end-to-end framework that generates a realistic image of a traffic sign from a given image of a traffic sign and a pictogram of the target class. We propo…
Hyperlocal disaster damage assessment using bi-temporal street-view imagery and pre-trained vision models
Department of Geography, Texas A&M University（地理系，德克萨斯A&M大学）；Department of Geography, Pennsylvania State University（地理系，宾夕法尼亚州立大学）；Department of Geography and Sustainability, University of Tennessee（地理与可持续发展系，田纳西大学）；Spatial Sciences Institute, University of Southern California（空间科学研究所，南加州大学）
This paper introduces a conditional generative adversarial network to redesign a street-level image of urban scenes by generating 1) an urban intervention policy, 2) an attention map that localises where intervention is needed, 3) a high-resolution street-level image (1024 X 1024 or 1536 X1536) after implementing the intervention. We also introduce a new dataset that comprises aligned street-level images of before and after urban interventions from real-life scenarios that make this research possible. The introduced method has been trained on different ranges of urban interventions applied to …
Northeastern University（东北大学）；University Space Research Association（大学空间研究协会）；NASA Ames Research Center（美国国家航空航天局艾姆斯研究中心）；University of Massachusetts, Amherst（马萨诸塞大学阿默斯特分校）；University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）；Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）
Urban air pollution is a public health challenge in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). However, LMICs lack adequate air quality (AQ) monitoring infrastructure. A persistent challenge has been our inability to estimate AQ accurately in LMIC cities, which hinders emergency preparedness and risk mitigation. Deep learning-based models that map satellite imagery to AQ can be built for high-income countries (HICs) with adequate ground data. Here we demonstrate that a scalable approach that adapts deep transfer learning on satellite imagery for AQ can extract meaningful estimates and insights …
European Commission, Joint Research Centre (JRC)（欧盟委员会联合研究中心）
Street-level imagery holds a significant potential to scale-up in-situ data collection. This is enabled by combining the use of cheap high quality cameras with recent advances in deep learning compute solutions to derive relevant thematic information. We present a framework to collect and extract crop type and phenological information from street level imagery using computer vision. During the 2018 growing season, high definition pictures were captured with side-looking action cameras in the Flevoland province of the Netherlands. Each month from March to October, a fixed 200-km route was surve…
Multimodal Urban Tree Detection from Satellite and Street-Level Imagery via Annotation-Efficient Deep Learning Strategies
Department of Computer Science, University of California, Davis（加州大学戴维斯分校计算机科学系）；Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering, University of California, Davis（加州大学戴维斯分校生物与农业工程系）
DamageArbiter: A Multimodal Arbitration Framework for Disaster Damage Assessment from Street-View Imagery
organization= Department of Geography, Texas A\&M University , city= College Station , country= USA；organization= Department of Landscape Architecture \& Urban Planning, Texas A\&M University , city= College Station , country= USA；organization= Department of Industrial；Systems Engineering, University of Florida , city= Gainesville , country= USA；organization= Spatial Sciences Institute, University of Southern California , city= Los Angeles , country= USA；organization= Department of Geography；Sustainability, University of Tennessee , city= Knoxville , country= USA
