Towards a "typification" of the pedestrian surrounding space: Analysis of the isovist using digital processing method

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to couple the isovists field (a useful tool to determine the surroundings) with a classical digital signal processing method so as to classify the open spaces all along a pedestrian pathway and identify some urban patterns. Indeed, it could be of a great interest to determine automatically the type of surrounding spaces to improve the knowledge of the urban fabric at an intermediate level (the one of someone immersed in the city) and to make it possible to enrich its visual perception in real time using dedicated numerical devices. After a brief overview of visibility analysis methods, we focus on the isovist one. The remainder of this paper is dedicated to the methodology of visualscape fingerprint characterization we developed. At last, before concluding, we present a use case based on a real pathway. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011.