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Cameras and crowds in transportation tracking

Published: 14 October 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Active transportation is an important contributor to physical activity. Understanding active transportation trends and transportation mode share is important to public health research and city planners. Objective measurement of active transportation can be costly and time-consuming, and existing camera-based algorithms, while developing, are functionally limited to specific settings and distances. In this study, 28,992 publicly available webcam images from two intersections in Washington, D.C., were used to establish trends in active transportation. Amazon Mechanical Turk workers were found to be reliable identifiers of pedestrian and vehicular activity, data validated against trained research assistant image annotation. Webcam and crowdsource annotation provides a cost-effective alternative to traditional objective measures of active transportation and mode share through the use of publicly available wireless webcams. Additional research is needed to expand the utility and external validity of publicly available imaged-based active transportation methodology and image annotation.

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Cited By

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  • (2017)CrowdEyesProceedings of the 19th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services10.1145/3098279.3098559(1-13)Online publication date: 4-Sep-2017
  • (2016)Webcams, Crowdsourcing, and Enhanced Crosswalks: Developing a Novel Method to Analyze Active TransportationFrontiers in Public Health10.3389/fpubh.2016.000974Online publication date: 19-May-2016
  • (2016)Emerging technologies to measure neighborhood conditions in public health: implications for interventions and next stepsInternational Journal of Health Geographics10.1186/s12942-016-0050-z15:1Online publication date: 23-Jun-2016

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Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences
WH '15: Proceedings of the conference on Wireless Health
October 2015
157 pages
ISBN:9781450338516
DOI:10.1145/2811780
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Publication History

Published: 14 October 2015

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Author Tags

  1. active transportation
  2. crowdsourcing
  3. mode share
  4. webcams

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WH '15
WH '15: Wireless Health 2015 Conference
October 14 - 16, 2015
Maryland, Bethesda

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WH '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 28 of 106 submissions, 26%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 35 of 139 submissions, 25%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2017)CrowdEyesProceedings of the 19th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services10.1145/3098279.3098559(1-13)Online publication date: 4-Sep-2017
  • (2016)Webcams, Crowdsourcing, and Enhanced Crosswalks: Developing a Novel Method to Analyze Active TransportationFrontiers in Public Health10.3389/fpubh.2016.000974Online publication date: 19-May-2016
  • (2016)Emerging technologies to measure neighborhood conditions in public health: implications for interventions and next stepsInternational Journal of Health Geographics10.1186/s12942-016-0050-z15:1Online publication date: 23-Jun-2016

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