Determining Accessible Sidewalk Width by Extracting Obstacle Information from Point Clouds
This addresses accessibility issues for citizens using assistive devices, but it is incremental as it builds on existing point cloud methods for a specific urban application.
The paper tackled the problem of obstacles blocking sidewalks by proposing a pipeline to estimate obstacle-free sidewalk widths from 3D point cloud data of Amsterdam, enabling better route planning and city management.
Obstacles on the sidewalk often block the path, limiting passage and resulting in frustration and wasted time, especially for citizens and visitors who use assistive devices (wheelchairs, walkers, strollers, canes, etc). To enable equal participation and use of the city, all citizens should be able to perform and complete their daily activities in a similar amount of time and effort. Therefore, we aim to offer accessibility information regarding sidewalks, so that citizens can better plan their routes, and to help city officials identify the location of bottlenecks and act on them. In this paper we propose a novel pipeline to estimate obstacle-free sidewalk widths based on 3D point cloud data of the city of Amsterdam, as the first step to offer a more complete set of information regarding sidewalk accessibility.