‘Big data’ for pedestrian volume Exploring the use of Google Street View images for pedestrian counts.pdfVIP

Applied Geography 63 (2015) 337e345 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Applied Geography journal homepage: /locate/apgeog ‘Big data’ for pedestrian volume: Exploring the use of Google Street View images for pedestrian counts Li Yin a, *, Qimin Cheng b, Zhenxin Wang c, Zhenfeng Shao d a Department of Urban and Regional Planning, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, Buffalo, NY 14214, USA b Department of Electronics and Information Engineering, Huazhong University of Science Technology, Wuhan 430074, China c Center for Human-Engaged Computing, Kochi University of Technology, 185 Miyanokuchi, Tosayamada-Cho, Kami-Shi, Kochi 782-8502, Japan d The State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering on Surveying Mapping and Remote Sensing, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430079, China article info Article history: Received 9 March 2015 Received in revised form 19 July 2015 Accepted 19 July 2015 Available online 30 July 2015 Keywords: ‘Big data’ Google Street View Pedestrian count Walkability abstract New sources of data such as ‘big data’ and computational analytics have stimulated innovative pedestrian oriented research. Current studies, however, are still limited and subjective with regard to the use of Google Street View and other online sources for environment audits or pedestrian counts because of the manual information extraction and compilation, especially for large areas. This study aims to provide future research an alternative method to conduct large scale data collection more consistently and objectively on pedestrian counts and possibly for environment audits and stimulate discussion of the use of ‘big data’ and recent computational advances for planning and design. We explore and report information needed to automatically download and assemble Google Street View images, as well as other image parameters for a wide range of analysis and visualization, and explore extracting pedestrian count data based on these images using machine vision and le