Fingerprinting New York City's Scaffolding Problem with Longitudinal Dashcam Data

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Shapira, Dorin, Franchi, Matt, Ju, Wendy
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Shapira, Dorin
Franchi, Matt
Ju, Wendy
author_facet Shapira, Dorin
Franchi, Matt
Ju, Wendy
contents Scaffolds, also called sidewalk sheds, are intended to be temporary structures to protect pedestrians from construction and repair hazards. However, some sidewalk sheds are left up for years. Long-term scaffolding becomes eyesores, creates accessibility issues on sidewalks, and gives cover to illicit activity. Today, there are over 8,000 active permits for scaffolds in NYC; the more problematic scaffolds are likely expired or unpermitted. This research uses computer vision on street-level imagery to develop a longitudinal map of scaffolding throughout the city. Using a dataset of 29,156,833 dashcam images taken between August 2023 and January 2024, we develop an algorithm to track the presence of scaffolding over time. We also design and implement methods to match detected scaffolds to reported locations of active scaffolding permits, enabling the identification of sidewalk sheds without corresponding permits. We identify 850,766 images of scaffolding, tagging 5,156 active sidewalk sheds and estimating 529 unpermitted sheds. We discuss the implications of an in-the-wild scaffolding classifier for urban tech, innovations to governmental inspection processes, and out-of-distribution evaluations outside of New York City.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_06801
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Fingerprinting New York City's Scaffolding Problem with Longitudinal Dashcam Data
Shapira, Dorin
Franchi, Matt
Ju, Wendy
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computers and Society
Scaffolds, also called sidewalk sheds, are intended to be temporary structures to protect pedestrians from construction and repair hazards. However, some sidewalk sheds are left up for years. Long-term scaffolding becomes eyesores, creates accessibility issues on sidewalks, and gives cover to illicit activity. Today, there are over 8,000 active permits for scaffolds in NYC; the more problematic scaffolds are likely expired or unpermitted. This research uses computer vision on street-level imagery to develop a longitudinal map of scaffolding throughout the city. Using a dataset of 29,156,833 dashcam images taken between August 2023 and January 2024, we develop an algorithm to track the presence of scaffolding over time. We also design and implement methods to match detected scaffolds to reported locations of active scaffolding permits, enabling the identification of sidewalk sheds without corresponding permits. We identify 850,766 images of scaffolding, tagging 5,156 active sidewalk sheds and estimating 529 unpermitted sheds. We discuss the implications of an in-the-wild scaffolding classifier for urban tech, innovations to governmental inspection processes, and out-of-distribution evaluations outside of New York City.
title Fingerprinting New York City's Scaffolding Problem with Longitudinal Dashcam Data
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.06801