Open-source data pipeline for street-view images: a case study on community mobility during COVID-19 pandemic
This addresses the challenge of infrequent Google Street View data collection for researchers studying urban mobility, though it is incremental as it builds on existing SVI methods with a new data source.
The researchers developed an open-source data pipeline for generating street-view images from 360-degree car-mounted video to enable temporal analysis, demonstrating it with a 38-month dataset from Seattle during COVID-19 that validated pedestrian traffic patterns and provided new insights.
Street View Images (SVI) are a common source of valuable data for researchers. Researchers have used SVI data for estimating pedestrian volumes, demographic surveillance, and to better understand built and natural environments in cityscapes. However, the most common source of publicly available SVI data is Google Street View. Google Street View images are collected infrequently, making temporal analysis challenging, especially in low population density areas. Our main contribution is the development of an open-source data pipeline for processing 360-degree video recorded from a car-mounted camera. The video data is used to generate SVIs, which then can be used as an input for temporal analysis. We demonstrate the use of the pipeline by collecting a SVI dataset over a 38-month longitudinal survey of Seattle, WA, USA during the COVID-19 pandemic. The output of our pipeline is validated through statistical analyses of pedestrian traffic in the images. We confirm known results in the literature and provide new insights into outdoor pedestrian traffic patterns. This study demonstrates the feasibility and value of collecting and using SVI for research purposes beyond what is possible with currently available SVI data. Limitations and future improvements on the data pipeline and case study are also discussed.