WalkCLIP: Multimodal Learning for Urban Walkability Prediction

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Xiang, Shilong, Lee, JangHyeon, Namgung, Min, Chiang, Yao-Yi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Xiang, Shilong
Lee, JangHyeon
Namgung, Min
Chiang, Yao-Yi
author_facet Xiang, Shilong
Lee, JangHyeon
Namgung, Min
Chiang, Yao-Yi
contents Urban walkability is a cornerstone of public health, sustainability, and quality of life. Traditional walkability assessments rely on surveys and field audits, which are costly and difficult to scale. Recent studies have used satellite imagery, street view imagery, or population indicators to estimate walkability, but these single-source approaches capture only one dimension of the walking environment. Satellite data describe the built environment from above, but overlook the pedestrian perspective. Street view imagery captures conditions at the ground level, but lacks broader spatial context. Population dynamics reveal patterns of human activity but not the visual form of the environment. We introduce WalkCLIP, a multimodal framework that integrates these complementary viewpoints to predict urban walkability. WalkCLIP learns walkability-aware vision-language representations from GPT-4o generated image captions, refines these representations with a spatial aggregation module that incorporates neighborhood context, and fuses the resulting features with representations from a population dynamics foundation model. Evaluated at 4,660 locations throughout Minneapolis-Saint Paul, WalkCLIP outperforms unimodal and multimodal baselines in both predictive accuracy and spatial alignment. These results show that the integration of visual and behavioral signals yields reliable predictions of the walking environment.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_21947
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle WalkCLIP: Multimodal Learning for Urban Walkability Prediction
Xiang, Shilong
Lee, JangHyeon
Namgung, Min
Chiang, Yao-Yi
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Urban walkability is a cornerstone of public health, sustainability, and quality of life. Traditional walkability assessments rely on surveys and field audits, which are costly and difficult to scale. Recent studies have used satellite imagery, street view imagery, or population indicators to estimate walkability, but these single-source approaches capture only one dimension of the walking environment. Satellite data describe the built environment from above, but overlook the pedestrian perspective. Street view imagery captures conditions at the ground level, but lacks broader spatial context. Population dynamics reveal patterns of human activity but not the visual form of the environment. We introduce WalkCLIP, a multimodal framework that integrates these complementary viewpoints to predict urban walkability. WalkCLIP learns walkability-aware vision-language representations from GPT-4o generated image captions, refines these representations with a spatial aggregation module that incorporates neighborhood context, and fuses the resulting features with representations from a population dynamics foundation model. Evaluated at 4,660 locations throughout Minneapolis-Saint Paul, WalkCLIP outperforms unimodal and multimodal baselines in both predictive accuracy and spatial alignment. These results show that the integration of visual and behavioral signals yields reliable predictions of the walking environment.
title WalkCLIP: Multimodal Learning for Urban Walkability Prediction
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.21947