arXiv Machine Learning By Moloud Damandeh, Meead Saberi

Walkable to Whom? Capturing Subjective Variability in Walkability Perception Using Multimodal Deep Learning

Read the original on arXiv Machine Learning →

arXiv:2608. 06934v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Visual perception of walkability varies substantially across individuals, reflecting differences in personal characteristics, experiences, and preferences.

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arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

MMS-VPR: A Fine-Grained Multimodal Street-Level Visual Place Recognition Dataset and Evaluation Benchmark for Dense Pedestrian Environments

arXiv:2505.12254v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Existing visual place recognition (VPR) datasets predominantly rely on vehicle-mounted imagery, offer limited multimodal diversity, and under...

By Yiwei Ou, Xiaobin Ren, Ronggui Sun, Guansong Gao, Kaiqi Zhao, Manfredo Manfredini
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 Machine Learning
Aug 18

In-Context Learning to Assess Built Environment Impacts on Perceived Neighborhood Walkability Among Mobility-impaired Older Adults

arXiv:2608. 14663v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As global populations age, enhancing neighborhood walkability through inclusive urban design is important for mitigating built environment (BE) barriers that discourage physical activity and social participation among older adults.

By Houhao Liang, Kresimir Friganovic, Joanne Kua, Noor Hafizah Ismail, Su Su, Bryan Yijia Tan, Navrag B. Singh, Panos Mavros
arXiv AI
3d ago

Caption-Mediated Perceived-Safety Estimation for Pedestrian Routing

The paper introduces an explainable pedestrian routing method that estimates perceived safety by first generating a natural‑language caption from street‑level images and then deriving risk scores solely from structured features of that caption. Benchmarking nine captioning setups against a CLIP image‑embedding baseline shows comparable performance, and the system was deployed on over 650,000 images across 36 wards in Manchester and Huddersfield. Field validation with 3,669 ratings from 70 participants revealed a modest but statistically significant correlation (r = 0.262) with human judgments, while a stronger supervised benchmark did not translate into better real‑world performance.

By Simon Parkinson, Paloma Liu, Wei Zheng, Mohammadreza Sheikhfathollahi
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 23

Sidewalk Moments: Are Richer Representations Always More Human-Aligned? Evidence from City-Walk Videos

We examine whether richer visual representations yield more human-aligned measures of urban engagement, using 61 first-person city-walk videos from YouTube segmented into over 50,000 ten-second clips and represented across four modalities: spatiotemporal video features, temporally averaged images (TAIs), audio embeddings, and text-based semantic descriptions. Spearman correlation analysis reveals the expected ordering along the temporal-richness continuum, with video features showing the strongest continuous alignment.