2019 journal article

Visualization of Pedestrian Density Dynamics Using Data Extracted from Public Webcams

ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information, 8(12), 559.

co-author countries: United States of America 🇺🇸
author keywords: GIS; space-time cube; geovisualization; KDE; urban dynamics; georeferencing; pedestrian density
Source: ORCID
Added: December 6, 2019

Accurate information on the number and distribution of pedestrians in space and time helps urban planners maintain current city infrastructure and design better public spaces for local residents and visitors. Previous studies have demonstrated that using webcams together with crowdsourcing platforms to locate pedestrians in the captured images is a promising technique for analyzing pedestrian activity. However, it is challenging to efficiently transform the time series of pedestrian locations in the images to information suitable for geospatial analytics, as well as visualize data in a meaningful way to inform urban design or decision making. In this study, we propose to use a space-time cube (STC) representation of pedestrian data to analyze the spatio-temporal patterns of pedestrians in public spaces. We take advantage of AMOS (The Archive of Many Outdoor Scenes), a large database of images captured by thousands of publicly available, outdoor webcams. We developed a method to obtain georeferenced spatio-temporal data from webcams and to transform them into high-resolution continuous representation of pedestrian densities by combining bivariate kernel density estimation with trivariate, spatio-temporal spline interpolation. We demonstrate our method on two case studies analyzing pedestrian activity of two city plazas. The first case study explores daily and weekly spatio-temporal patterns of pedestrian activity while the second one highlights the differences in pattern before and after plaza’s redevelopment. While STC has already been used to visualize urban dynamics, this is the first study analyzing the evolution of pedestrian density based on crowdsourced time series of pedestrian occurrences captured by webcam images.