Characterisation of urban environment and activity across space and time using street images and deep learning in Accra

Author:

Nathvani Ricky,Clark Sierra N.,Muller Emily,Alli Abosede S.,Bennett James E.,Nimo James,Moses Josephine Bedford,Baah Solomon,Metzler A. Barbara,Brauer MichaelORCID,Suel EsraORCID,Hughes Allison F.,Rashid Theo,Gemmell Emily,Moulds Simon,Baumgartner JillORCID,Toledano MireilleORCID,Agyemang Ernest,Owusu George,Agyei-Mensah Samuel,Arku Raphael E.,Ezzati MajidORCID

Abstract

AbstractThe urban environment influences human health, safety and wellbeing. Cities in Africa are growing faster than other regions but have limited data to guide urban planning and policies. Our aim was to use smart sensing and analytics to characterise the spatial patterns and temporal dynamics of features of the urban environment relevant for health, liveability, safety and sustainability. We collected a novel dataset of 2.1 million time-lapsed day and night images at 145 representative locations throughout the Metropolis of Accra, Ghana. We manually labelled a subset of 1,250 images for 20 contextually relevant objects and used transfer learning with data augmentation to retrain a convolutional neural network to detect them in the remaining images. We identified 23.5 million instances of these objects including 9.66 million instances of persons (41% of all objects), followed by cars (4.19 million, 18%), umbrellas (3.00 million, 13%), and informally operated minibuses known as tro tros (2.94 million, 13%). People, large vehicles and market-related objects were most common in the commercial core and densely populated informal neighbourhoods, while refuse and animals were most observed in the peripheries. The daily variability of objects was smallest in densely populated settlements and largest in the commercial centre. Our novel data and methodology shows that smart sensing and analytics can inform planning and policy decisions for making cities more liveable, equitable, sustainable and healthy.

Funder

Imperial College London

Wellcome Trust

Publisher

Springer Science and Business Media LLC

Subject

Multidisciplinary

Reference98 articles.

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