Urban Commerce Distribution Analysis Based on Street View and Deep Learning

Abstract

Urban commerce and its distribution have always been an important part of urban research. However, most previous studies were based on statistical data and did not reflect real street experience. Thanks to the Street View image and deep learning technology, researchers are able to carry out large scale studies from real human visual experience. In this article, we aim at sensing the commercial spaces in cities. In order to achieve this ultimate goal, deep learning is applied to process the raw data of Street View image. We disassemble the goal into three tasks: firstly, obtaining all the Street View images in a specific area; then classifying the Street View images according to the commercial facilities in it; and finally creating a visualization of the detected data into a map. For the first task, we get the road network coordinate information from the openstreetmap (OSM) website, set the sampling point on the road, and then download the Street View images of the sampling points' coordinate through the API provided by Baidumap. For the second task, we adopt a two-level learning strategy rather than directly using Deep Convolutional Neural Network for classification. For the final task, we choose the heat map as the expression of the results and draw the map by the existing GIS software. Furthermore, the results from this study can be conveniently combined with other data because of the use of street-network-based data structure. An application of this method combines with street-network data, the calculation of a city's 15-minute commercial service circle coverage is also shown in this study.