Studying oppressive cityscapes of Bangladesh
This addresses mental health concerns for urban residents in densely populated cities like Dhaka, though it is incremental as it applies existing computer vision methods to a new context.
The paper tackles the problem of mental health risks from high-rise buildings in Dhaka by analyzing sky visibility and greenery from pedestrian perspectives using computer vision, finding that lower economic classes have lower sky visibility while higher classes lack greenery, suggesting rent restructuring as a solution.
In a densely populated city like Dhaka (Bangladesh), a growing number of high-rise buildings is an inevitable reality. However, they pose mental health risks for citizens in terms of detachment from natural light, sky view, greenery, and environmental landscapes. The housing economy and rent structure in different areas may or may not take account of such environmental factors. In this paper, we build a computer vision based pipeline to study factors like sky visibility, greenery in the sidewalks, and dominant colors present in streets from a pedestrian's perspective. We show that people in lower economy classes may suffer from lower sky visibility, whereas people in higher economy classes may suffer from lack of greenery in their environment, both of which could be possibly addressed by implementing rent restructuring schemes.