Visual Urban Space Assessment from Sky Shape Analysis

Several techniques have already been proposed to study the visual perception of the urban environment along a route or a path. Some of them are based on Gibson's concept of motion perspective. Motion perspective refers to the gradual change in the rate of displacement of contour lines in the visual field. Initially developed in the field of aviation psychology, this effect proved to be of paramount importance in the perception of any observer in displacement. In this paper, we propose to develop a computer method to analyze this motion perspective. Our method is based on Teller's spherical metric. It takes advantage of skeletonization, a technique heavily used in image analysis.

[1]  R. Hetherington The Perception of the Visual World , 1952 .

[2]  Gordon Cullen The Concise Townscape , 1971 .

[3]  Gabriella Sanniti di Baja,et al.  Skeletonization algorithm running on path-based distance maps , 1996, Image Vis. Comput..

[4]  Kaleem Siddiqi,et al.  Robust and efficient skeletal graphs , 2000, Proceedings IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. CVPR 2000 (Cat. No.PR00662).

[5]  A. Turner,et al.  From Isovists to Visibility Graphs: A Methodology for the Analysis of Architectural Space , 2001 .

[6]  Sven Loncaric,et al.  A survey of shape analysis techniques , 1998, Pattern Recognit..

[7]  Daniel Siret,et al.  Visual Analysis of Urban Environment , 2002 .

[8]  Jacques Teller,et al.  A Spherical Metric for the Field-Oriented Analysis of Complex Urban Open Spaces , 2003 .

[9]  Bill Hillier,et al.  The social logic of space: Buildings and their genotypes , 1984 .

[10]  Kevin Lynch,et al.  The Image of the City , 1960 .

[11]  William Rucklidge,et al.  Efficient Visual Recognition Using the Hausdorff Distance , 1996, Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

[12]  M. Benedikt,et al.  To Take Hold of Space: Isovists and Isovist Fields , 1979 .

[13]  Mahbub Rashid,et al.  On the Description of Shape and Spatial Configuration inside Buildings: Convex Partitions and Their Local Properties , 1997 .

[14]  G. Borgefors Distance transformations in arbitrary dimensions , 1984 .

[15]  Jacques Teller La régulation morphologique dans le cadre du projet urbain. Spécification d’instruments informatiques destinés à supporter les modes de régulation performantiels , 2001 .

[16]  Peter Bosselmann,et al.  Representation of Places: Reality and Realism in City Design , 1998 .

[17]  Olaf Kübler,et al.  Hierarchic Voronoi skeletons , 1995, Pattern Recognit..

[18]  Donald Appleyard,et al.  The View From the Road , 1965 .

[19]  Hans-Peter Seidel,et al.  One-Sided Stability of Medial Axis Transform , 2001, DAGM-Symposium.

[20]  Kaleem Siddiqi,et al.  Hamilton-Jacobi Skeletons , 2002, International Journal of Computer Vision.

[21]  Frederic Fol Leymarie Three-dimensional shape representation via shock flows , 2003 .