Leveraging Street Level Imagery for Urban Planning

Abstract

There is an old saying that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if the picture or image is geographical in nature? With popular sites like Flickr and Instagram, and high quality cameras and GPS in smartphones, a proliferation of georeferenced photographs have become available. Unsurprisingly, they have been the subject of much research interest. In addition to geographical coordinates, they have date and time stamps, which allows for a variety of rich spatial-temporal analyses. Examples of such applications are now in evidence in Environment and Planning B, for example to characterize scenic areas (Seresinhe et al., 2018) or to measure the size of crowds (Botta et al., 2020).

Topics & Concepts