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:2606. 15890v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Understanding urban wellbeing from multimodal data requires integrating heterogeneous spatial and temporal signals, posing significant challenges for current multimodal large language models (MLLMs).
By Yanxin Xi, Xiang Su, Jie Feng, Yu Liu, Sasu Tarkoma, Pan Hui
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: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
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
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.