Peter Kiefer

Tianyi Xiao, Yizi Chen, Sidi Wu et al.

Sketch mapping is widely used in crime scene investigation (CSI) to document, interpret, and communicate spatial information. However, it is typically performed on 2D media, which limits its ability to represent 3D spatial relationships. We present HolmeSketcher, a generative 3D sketch mapping system that combines a front-end 3D drawing interface with a back-end deep learning pipeline to support object generation and scene reconstruction in extended reality. In a within-subject user study (N = 15), HolmeSketcher improved the spatial accuracy and interpretability of reconstructed scenes, but with a clear trade-off of higher task load and lower usability compared with paper-based 2D sketch mapping. By integrating findings from the user study and expert interviews (N = 3), we further derive three design implications for next-generation 3D sketch mapping tools for CSI.

Lin Che, Yizi Chen, Tanhua Jin et al.

Urban land use classification and mapping are critical for urban planning, resource management, and environmental monitoring. Existing remote sensing techniques often lack precision in complex urban environments due to the absence of ground-level details. Unlike aerial perspectives, street view images provide a ground-level view that captures more human and social activities relevant to land use in complex urban scenes. Existing street view-based methods primarily rely on supervised classification, which is challenged by the scarcity of high-quality labeled data and the difficulty of generalizing across diverse urban landscapes. This study introduces an unsupervised contrastive clustering model for street view images with a built-in geographical prior, to enhance clustering performance. When combined with a simple visual assignment of the clusters, our approach offers a flexible and customizable solution to land use mapping, tailored to the specific needs of urban planners. We experimentally show that our method can generate land use maps from geotagged street view image datasets of two cities. As our methodology relies on the universal spatial coherence of geospatial data ("Tobler's law"), it can be adapted to various settings where street view images are available, to enable scalable, unsupervised land use mapping and updating. The code will be available at https://github.com/lin102/CCGP.

Lin Che, Xi Wang, Marc Pollefeys et al.

Urban perception describes how people subjectively evaluate urban environments, shaping how cities are experienced and understood. Existing computational approaches primarily model urban perception directly from street view images, but largely ignore the human perceptual process through which such judgments are formed. In this paper, we introduce Place Pulse-Gaze, an urban perception dataset that augments street view images with synchronized eye-tracking recordings and individual perception labels. Based on this dataset, we propose a Gaze-Guided Urban Perception Framework to study how gaze behavior contributes to the modeling of subjective urban perception. The framework systematically investigates three complementary settings: gaze-only modeling, gaze fusion with explicit semantic scene representations, and gaze fusion with implicit richer visual representations. Experiments show that gaze alone already carries useful predictive signals for subjective urban perception, and that integrating gaze with scene representations further improves prediction under both semantic and richer visual representations. Overall, our findings highlight the importance of incorporating human perceptual processes into urban scene understanding and open a direction for gaze-guided multimodal urban computing.