9th May 2023

Tuesday 14:00 - 15:30

Sensing Cities with Street-level Imagery

The emergence of urban big data has provided a novel approach  to comprehending the spatial and temporal dynamics of cities and evaluating the urbanization process.  Street view images are a new type of geographic big data that can help us understand urban material space.  Recently, advances in artificial intelligence technology, particularly in deep learning and computer vision,  have enabled us to mine semantic information from street view images and gain a quantitative understanding of material space.  Street view images are not only a supplement to remote sensing images,  but they also allow us to observe urban material space from a human perspective.  Furthermore, street view images provide insight into urban social space,  revealing the human activities and socio-economic environment that underlie the urban material space.  This perspective offers new opportunities for research on the relationship between humans and their environment,  the quantification of built environments, spatial data mining, and knowledge discovery based on big data.  This report, based on the framework of urban visual intelligence, introduces several cases 

that illustrate how street view images have been used in urban research from four dimensions: data, scene, place, and city.

Dr Fan Zhang

Assistant Professor, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Senior Research Associate, MIT. Leader, Urban Visual AI group, MIT Senseable City Lab. Dr Fan Zhang was formerly a Senior Research Fellow at MIT and the lead of the Urban Visual AI group at the MIT Senseable City Lab. His research lies at the intersection of GIScience, Geospatial Data Science, and Computer Vision. Dr Zhang is currently an associate editor of Transactions in Urban Data, Science, and Technology, a guest editor of ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, and a reviewer for over 40 SCI journals in GIS and Remote Sensing. He was included in the Stanford's list of world's top 2% scientists in 2022. He was recognized as Geospatial World 50 Rising Stars in 2022 and received the Global Young Scientist Award in Frontier Science and Technology at WGDC 2020.

Centre for Urban Science and Planning,TONGJl

College of Architecture and Urban Planning, TONGJI

World Urban Planning Education Network