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: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
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
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
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
This paper presents an end-to-end, agent-driven pipeline for the LoD3 reconstruction of facade openings in 3D city models, producing directly usable CityGML-conform outputs. In contrast to existing ap...