arXiv Computer Vision

UrbanVGGT: Scalable Sidewalk Width Estimation from Street View Images

arXiv:2603. 22531v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Sidewalk width is an important indicator of pedestrian accessibility, comfort, and network quality, yet large-scale width data remain scarce in most cities.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 21

From Street View Imagery to Street Quality Indicators: Vision Language Inference for the Suburban 15-minute City

arXiv:2608. 20026v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Streetscape quality has become a central concern in contemporary urban planning, particularly within the framework of the pedestrian-friendly 15-minute city, where walkability and public-space quality are increasingly recognized as key determinants of urban performance.

By Joan Perez, Giovanni Fusco
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 24

Safety-oriented sidewalk and road segmentation for smartphone-based assistive navigation

arXiv:2607. 21137v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Independent sidewalk mobility is essential for blind and visually impaired pedestrians (BVIPs), yet smartphone-based assistive navigation requires perception models that distinguish walkable sidewalks from adjacent unsafe regions.

By Hakan Calim, Anamaria Dumitrescu, Adarsh Bhandary Panambur, Huzaifa Asif, Andreas Maier
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 2

Seeing the City or Recognizing the Place? What Street-View Imagery Adds Beyond Existing Urban Data in VLM Urban Sensing

The study evaluates how much street‑view imagery contributes to urban attribute prediction beyond existing public data. By comparing image‑based models with seven attributes from five public sources and three vision‑language models, the authors find that images outperform other data for building type, function, and low‑rise floor count, while existing data match or exceed image performance for road damage, curb ramps, and house price. The benefit of images varies with visual legibility and local data coverage, suggesting that image value depends on how well the scene is captured and how much complementary data is available.

By Kaizhen Tan
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 31

iOSPointMapper: RealTime Pedestrian and Accessibility Mapping with Mobile AI

iOSPointMapper is a mobile app that performs real‑time, privacy‑conscious sidewalk mapping using on‑device semantic segmentation, LiDAR depth estimation, and fused GPS/IMU data on recent iPhones and iPads. It detects and localizes sidewalk‑relevant features such as traffic signs, traffic lights, and poles, and includes a user‑guided annotation interface for validating outputs before submission. The anonymized data is transmitted to the Transportation Data Exchange Initiative (TDEI), where it integrates with broader multimodal transportation datasets, and evaluations show the app’s potential for enhanced pedestrian mapping.

By Himanshu Naidu, Yuxiang Zhang, Sachin Mehta, Anat Caspi
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 17

Can VLMs Reliably Assess Sidewalk Accessibility Attributes from Pedestrian-Level Imagery?

The study evaluates whether vision‑language models (VLMs) can reliably assess sidewalk accessibility attributes—effective width, longitudinal slope, cross slope, and pavement condition—from pedestrian‑level images. Using sampling‑based conformal prediction on 514 images from Seoul, the authors find that calibrated models achieve nominal 90% coverage, but only effective width yields informative estimates; other attributes remain too uncertain for compliance assessment. The work also demonstrates that raw sampling dispersion is not a trustworthy uncertainty measure without calibration and releases annotated images with ground‑truth measurements.

By Seung Jae Lieu, Diego Morra, Chiara Cadoni, Wonseop Song, Martina Mazzarello, Carlo Ratti
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 1

SVI2LoD3: Agent-Driven Reconstruction of LoD3 Facade Openings in Semantic 3D City Models from Volunteered Street View Imagery using Large Language and Visual Models

arXiv:2608.29992v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper presents an end-to-end, agent-driven pipeline for the LoD3 reconstruction of facade openings in 3D city models, producing directly usable Ci...

By Elmehdi Kanna, Lukas Arzoumanidis, Huynh Duc An Son Nguyen, Youness Dehbi
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 25

A Vision-Language Framework for Measuring Social Life on Sidewalks

The paper introduces a vision‑language framework that extracts social indicators from street‑level imagery, converting panoramic views into sidewalk‑facing sideviews with timestamps. Using a VLM‑based activity detection system, it codes each pedestrian across ten observable dimensions, producing a Social Dwelling Index (SDI) that captures grouping, dwelling, activity diversity, and accessibility flags. Applied to over 100,000 sideviews in New York City, the study finds that pedestrian volume and SDI are only weakly correlated, indicating that high foot traffic does not necessarily equate to intense social activity.

By Liu Liu, Andres Sevtsuk
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 27

OpenCVL: An Open, Diverse, and Large-Scale Dataset for Fine-Grained Cross-View Localization

OpenCVL is a large, open dataset for fine-grained cross-view localization, comprising 617,388 ground‑aerial image pairs from 41 European cities. It blends high‑end sensor data with diverse in‑the‑wild images and includes a curation framework to correct pose annotations, enabling reliable evaluation. The dataset also offers cross‑area and snowy test sets to probe generalization, and experiments show that adding noisy in‑the‑wild data improves model performance on clean tests.

By Zimin Xia, Mubariz Zaffar, Junsheng Fu, Alexandre Alahi, Julian F. P. Kooij