Walkway Discovery from Large Scale Crowdsensing

Most digital maps are designed for vehicles and miss a great number of walkways that can facilitate people's daily mobility as pedestrians. Despite of such a fact, most existing map updating approaches only focus on the motorways. To fill the gap, this paper presents VitalAlley, a walkway discovery and verification approach with mobility data from large scale crowdsensing. VitalAlley aims to identify the uncharted walkways from the big but noisy personal mobility data and incorporate these findings into existing incomplete road maps. The implementation of VitalAlley faces the major challenges due to the unstructured nature of the walkways themselves and the noise from crowdsensing data. VitalAlley leverages different aspects of individual mobility to model and estimate the walkable areas, based on which representative walkways that connect known road segments or points of interest are extracted. To verify the new-found walkways, we further propose image based auto-verification with the help of publicly accessible street image database from Google Street View. VitalAlley is implemented and evaluated with real world crowdsensing data from the Singapore National Science Experiment. As a result, 736 walkways (totaling 161 km in distance) are identified from the mobility dataset collected from 108,337 students in Singapore. We manually verify 224 walkways totaling 32.4 km over a 9 km2 district through on-site inspection. The results suggest over 96% accuracy of VitalAlley in discovering the walkways. © 2018 IEEE.