New How Security Is This Street?

One of the almost interesting uses of Google Maps Street View imagery has been past times MIT. MIT's Place Pulse projection is a crowd-sourced experiment examining people's perceptions of unlike urban environments. The projection aims to quantitatively recognize which areas of a metropolis are perceived every bit wealthy, modern, safe, lively, active, unique, central, adaptable or identify unit of measurement friendly based on how people reply to Street View images of the city.

MIT has instantly taken the the security rankings for 3,000 street images from New York too Boston too created an algorithm to automatically exercise a perceived security rating for Street View images. Using the Place Pulse scores MIT assigned attributes to features introduce inwards the images, associated alongside the image's textures, colors too shapes. They so used machine learning to associate ikon features alongside scores of perceived safety. MIT tin flaming so work the resulting algorithm to predict the perceived security of a novel image. They tin flaming thence give whatever Street View ikon a 'StreetScore' based on the results of the Place Pulse survey.


StreetScore has instantly released a divulge of maps showing areas of perceived security inwards New York, Boston, Chicago too Detroit. Using Street View images of the metropolis StreetScore assesses the perceived security of locations throughout the city. Green dots on the map stand upward for the areas which StreetScore has assigned every bit having a high perceived security rating too the cerise dots are the locations alongside a depression perceived rating score.

The information of the StreetScores for Boston too New York is available for download. It is provided inwards 2 comma separated CSV files. The CSV files stimulate got iii fields: latitude, longitude too q-score.

There is a lot to a greater extent than you lot could exercise alongside this data. I'd dear to run into a StreetScore map alongside a criminal offence heat-map layer. This would furnish a overnice agency to run into how closely the perceptions of street security inwards the MIT analysis matches upward to crimes on the ground.

One of the things missing from the Streetscore map is the mightiness to persuasion the Street View images of the locations. Therefore to a greater extent than or less other thought would hold out to exercise a Google Map of the information too include the option to click on the map too persuasion the actual Street View.


One of the things which intrigued me when browsing the map was what did the Street Views truly await similar for the locations alongside high too depression streetscores. To acquire to a greater extent than or less thought I downloaded the Boston StreetScore file too rapidly threw together this petty site showing the peak nine perceived safest locations too the peak nine perceived to the lowest degree condom locations inwards Boston. The site uses the Google Street View Image API to present all the same images of the locations.

In the master survey MIT solely showed a xc aeroplane persuasion of each location. The q-scores for the Boston too New York information doesn't include the 'yaw' information to betoken which purpose of the 360 aeroplane panorama was truly used inwards the survey. I thence merely used a random administration inwards the Street Views I've shown.

One matter that rapidly becomes apparent (see the screenshot above) is that the presence of trees seems to hold out a major element inwards the MIT algorithm for assessing the safest perceived streets.

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