A System for Generating Customized Pleasant Pedestrian Routes Based on OpenStreetMap Data

Data science for pedestrian and high street retailing as a framework for advancing urban informatics to individual scales

Background

In this paper, we consider the applicability of the customer journey framework from retailing as a driver for urban informatics at individual scales within urban science. The customer journey considers shopper experiences in the context of shopping paths, retail service spaces, and touch-points that draw them into contact. Around this framework, retailers have developed sophisticated data science for observation, identification, and measurement of customers in the context of their shopping behavior. This knowledge supports broad data-driven understanding of customer experiences in physical spaces, economic spaces of decision and choice, persuasive spaces of advertising and branding, and inter-personal spaces of customer-staff interaction.

Method

We review the literature on pedestrian and high street retailing, and on urban informatics. We investigate whether the customer journey could be usefully repurposed for urban applications. Specifically, we explore the potential use of the customer journey framework for producing new insight into pedestrian behavior, where a sort of empirical hyperopia has long abounded because data are always in short supply.

Results

Our review addresses how the customer journey might be used as a structure for examining how urban walkers come into contact with the built environment, how people actively and passively sense and perceive ambient city life as they move, how pedestrians make sense of urban context, and how they use this knowledge to build cognition of city streetscapes. Each of these topics has relevance to walking studies specifically, but also to urban science more generally. We consider how retailing might reciprocally benefit from urban science perspectives, especially in extending the reach of retailers' insight beyond store walls, into the retail high streets from which they draw custom.

Conclusion

We conclude that a broad set of theoretical frameworks, data collection schemes, and analytical methodologies that have advanced retail data science closer and closer to individual-level acumen might be usefully applied to accomplish the same in urban informatics. However, we caution that differences between retailers' and urban scientists' viewpoints on privacy presents potential controversy.

Road Characteristics Detection Based on Joint Convolutional Neural Networks with Adaptive Squares

The importance of road characteristics has been highlighted, as road characteristics are fundamental structures established to support many transportation-relevant services. However, there is still huge room for improvement in terms of types and performance of road characteristics detection. With the advantage of geographically tiled maps with high update rates, remarkable accessibility, and increasing availability, this paper proposes a novel simple deep-learning-based approach, namely joint convolutional neural networks (CNNs) adopting adaptive squares with combination rules to detect road characteristics from roadmap tiles. The proposed joint CNNs are responsible for the foreground and background image classification and various types of road characteristics classification from previous foreground images, raising detection accuracy. The adaptive squares with combination rules help efficiently focus road characteristics, augmenting the ability to detect them and provide optimal detection results. Five types of road characteristics—crossroads, T-junctions, Y-junctions, corners, and curves—are exploited, and experimental results demonstrate successful outcomes with outstanding performance in reality. The information of exploited road characteristics with location and type is, thus, converted from human-readable to machine-readable, the results will benefit many applications like feature point reminders, road condition reports, or alert detection for users, drivers, and even autonomous vehicles. We believe this approach will also enable a new path for object detection and geospatial information extraction from valuable map tiles.

Pedestrian Routing and Perspectives: WayFinder’s Route down the Lane—Come on with the Rain

People living in urban areas are often exposed to heat and inundation caused by heavy rains. Therefore, pedestrian routing in areas exposed to weather-related threats can be of value to citizens. In this study, water accumulated on roads, sidewalks and footpaths after rainfall and snowmelt was used as a case of adverse environmental conditions. Pedestrian routing was implemented in the web tool WayFinder and a group of 56 participants tested the tool in Trondheim, Norway. The study aimed to gain insight into their perspectives on the implemented pedestrian routing functionality to examine to what extent pedestrians find such functionality helpful for navigating in regions that are likely to be inundated. Each participant was asked to (1) use the tool in practice; (2) when walking, report on observed inundated areas; and (3) complete three questionnaires to provide feedback on the WayFinder tool. Although most of the participants were successful in using WayFinder, they preferred the selection of routes that passed through areas likely to be inundated and obtaining information about the risks than selecting a single route suggestion that already avoided exposed areas.

Walking Secure: Safe Routing Planning Algorithm and Pedestrian's Crossing Intention Detector Based on Fuzzy Logic App

Improving road safety through artificial intelligence is now crucial to achieving more secure smart cities. With this objective, a mobile app based on the integration of the smartphone sensors and a fuzzy logic strategy to determine the pedestrian’s crossing intention around crosswalks is presented. The app developed also allows the calculation, tracing and guidance of safe routes thanks to an optimization algorithm that includes pedestrian areas on the paths generated over the whole city through a cloud database (i.e., zebra crossings, pedestrian streets and walkways). The experimentation carried out consisted in testing the fuzzy logic strategy with a total of 31 volunteers crossing and walking around a crosswalk. For that, the fuzzy logic approach was subjected to a total of 3120 samples generated by the volunteers. It has been proven that a smartphone can be successfully used as a crossing intention detector system with an accuracy of 98.63%, obtaining a true positive rate of 98.27% and a specificity of 99.39% according to a receiver operating characteristic analysis. Finally, a total of 30 routes were calculated by the proposed algorithm and compared with Google Maps considering the values of time, distance and safety along the routes. As a result, the routes generated by the proposed algorithm were safer than the routes obtained with Google Maps, achieving an increase in the use of safe pedestrian areas of at least 183%.

The Capacitated Location-Allocation Problem Using the VAOMP (Vector Assignment Ordered Median Problem) Unified Approach in GIS (Geospatial Information Systam)

The Vector Assignment Ordered Median Problem (VAOMP) is a new unified approach for location-allocation problems, which are one of the most important forms of applied analysis in GIS (Geospatial Information System). Solving location-allocation problems with exact methods is difficult and time-consuming, especially when the number of objectives and criteria increases. One of the most important criteria in location-allocation problems is the capacity of facilities. Firstly, this study develops a new VAOMP approach by including capacity as a criterion, resulting in a new model known as VAOCMP (Vector Assignment Ordered Capacitated Median Problem). Then secondly, the results of applying VAOMP, in scenario 1, and VAOCMP, in scenario 2, for the location-allocation of fire stations in Tehran, with the objective of minimizing the arrival time of fire engines to an incident site to no more than 5 min, are examined using both the Tabu Search and Simulated Annealing algorithms in GIS. The results of scenario 1 show that 52,840 demands were unable to be served with 10 existing stations. In scenario 2, given that each facility could not accept demand above its capacity, the number of demands without service increased to 59,080, revealing that the number of stations in the study area is insufficient. Adding 35 candidate stations and performing relocation-reallocation revealed that at least three other stations are needed for optimal service. Thirdly, and finally, the VAOMP and VAOCMP were implemented in a modest size problem. The implementation results for both algorithms showed that the Tabu Search algorithm performed more effectively.

Towards Detecting Building Facades with Graffiti Artwork Based on Street View Images

As a recognized type of art, graffiti is a cultural asset and an important aspect of a city’s aesthetics. As such, graffiti is associated with social and commercial vibrancy and is known to attract tourists. However, positional uncertainty and incompleteness are current issues of open geo-datasets containing graffiti data. In this paper, we present an approach towards detecting building facades with graffiti artwork based on the automatic interpretation of images from Google Street View (GSV). It starts with the identification of geo-tagged photos of graffiti artwork posted on the photo sharing media Flickr. GSV images are then extracted from the surroundings of these photos and interpreted by a customized, i.e., transfer learned, convolutional neural network. The compass heading of the GSV images classified as containing graffiti artwork and the possible positions of their acquisition are considered for scoring building facades according to their potential of containing the artwork observable in the GSV images. More than 36,000 GSV images and 5000 facades from buildings represented in OpenStreetMap were processed and evaluated. Precision and recall rates were computed for different facade score thresholds. False-positive errors are caused mostly by advertisements and scribblings on the building facades as well as by movable objects containing graffiti artwork and obstructing the facades. However, considering higher scores as threshold for detecting facades containing graffiti leads to the perfect precision rate. Our approach can be applied for identifying previously unmapped graffiti artwork and for assisting map contributors interested in the topic. Furthermore, researchers interested on the spatial correlations between graffiti artwork and socio-economic factors can profit from our open-access code and results.

Mapping with Stakeholders: An Overview of Public Participatory GIS and VGI in Transport Decision-Making

Transport decision-making problems are typically spatially based and involve a set of feasible alternatives with multiple evaluation criteria. Besides, transport decisions affect citizens’ quality of life, as well as specific interests of general stakeholders (e.g., transport companies), thus needing a participatory approach to decision-making. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have the ability to visualize spatial data and represent the impact of location based transport alternatives, thus helping experts to conduct robust assessments. Moreover, with the recent diffusion of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) and development of Public Participatory GIS (PPGIS) platforms, the process can be enhanced thanks to the collection of a large amount of updated spatial data and the achievement of an active community participation. In this study, we provide an overview based on a structured literature review of the use of VGI and PPGIS in transport studies, exploring the fields of application, role played by GIS, level of public involvement and decision stage at which they are applied. From the overview’s results, we propose a general framework for the evaluation of transport alternatives using GIS from a multiple stakeholder point of view; the main conclusion is the usefulness of the integration between Public Participation, GIS and quantitative evaluation methods, in particular Multi Criteria Decision Analysis, in order to foster technically sound and shared decisions.