Urban infrastructure audit: an effective protocol to digitize signalized intersections by mining street view images

ABSTRACT Auditing and mapping traffic infrastructure is a crucial task in urban management. For example, signalized intersections play an essential role in transportation management; however, effectively identifying these intersections remains unsolved. Traditionally, signalized intersection data are manually collected through field audits or checking street view images (SVIs), which is time-consuming and labor-intensive. This study proposes an effective protocol to identify signalized intersections using road networks and SVIs. First, we propose a six-step geoprocessing model to generate an intersection feature layer from road networks. Second, we utilize up to three nearest SVIs to capture streetscapes at each intersection. Then, a deep learning-based image segmentation model is adopted to recognize traffic light-related pixels from each SVI. Last, we design a post-processing step to generate new features characterizing SVIs’ segmentation results at each intersection and build a decision tree model to determine the traffic control type. Results demonstrate that the proposed protocol can effectively identify signalized intersections with an overall accuracy of 97.05%. It also proves the effectiveness of SVIs for auditing urban infrastructures. This study can directly benefit transportation agencies by providing a ready-to-use smart audit and mapping solution for large-scale identification and mapping of signalized intersections.