Quantifying the Characteristics of the Local Urban Environment through Geotagged Flickr Photographs and Image Recognition

Meixu Chen,Alex Singleton,Dani Arribas-Bel

doi:10.3390/ijgi9040264

Meixu Chen, Alex Singleton + Show 1 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi9040264

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Abstract

Urban environments play a crucial role in the design, planning, and management of cities. Recently, as the urban population expands, the ways in which humans interact with their surroundings has evolved, presenting a dynamic distribution in space and time locally and frequently. Therefore, how to better understand the local urban environment and differentiate varying preferences for urban areas has been a big challenge for policymakers. This study leverages geotagged Flickr photographs to quantify characteristics of varying urban areas and exploit the dynamics of areas where more people assemble. An advanced image recognition model is used to extract features from large numbers of images in Inner London within the period 2013–2015. After the integration of characteristics, a series of visualisation techniques are utilised to explore the characteristic differences and their dynamics. We find that urban areas with higher population densities cover more iconic landmarks and leisure zones, while others are more related to daily life scenes. The dynamic results demonstrate that season determines human preferences for travel modes and activity modes. Our study expands the previous literature on the integration of image recognition method and urban perception analytics and provides new insights for stakeholders, who can use these findings as vital evidence for decision making.

Highlights

Urban environments play a crucial role in decision making in terms of the design, planning, and management of cities, which are closely linked with urban functions and their ecosystems
Photographs offer a wealth of information about the environment that can be analysed to determine why and how humans interact with urban areas [5]
Drawing on the limited research of dynamic urban perceptions and the ongoing improvements in image recognition performance, this study focuses on urban areas of interest (UAOIs) and their outer urban environments

Summary

Introduction

Urban environments play a crucial role in decision making in terms of the design, planning, and management of cities, which are closely linked with urban functions and their ecosystems. From a social perspective, understanding how humans experience these environments is important for improving urban functions. Traditional approaches to understanding the urban environment have relied on survey data. In addition to geographic information, many of these new forms of data have other attributes, such as time, user profiles, user evaluation, or user photographs, providing great opportunities for research in social and urban domains [4]. Among these attributes, photographs offer a wealth of information about the environment that can be analysed to determine why and how humans interact with urban areas [5]. Previous research on the content analysis of photographs is relatively rare [6–9]

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