Significant research for the project was conducted at NYU when Hosseini was a student there, working with Silva as a co-advisor. Silva, Institute Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at New York University (NYU) Tandon School of Engineering, and professor of data science at the NYU Center for Data Science. Cesar, a professor of computer science at the University of Sao Paulo and Claudio T. The authors are Hosseini Sevtsuk, who is the Charles and Ann Spaulding Career Development Associate Professor of Urban Science and Planning in DUSP and head of MIT’s City Form Lab Fabio Miranda, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Illinois at Chicago Roberto M. The paper, “ Mapping the Walk: A Scalable Computer Vision Approach for Generating Sidewalk Network Datasets from Aerial Imagery,” appears online in the journal Computers, Environment and Urban Systems. “We thought we needed a method that can be scalable and used in different cities,” says Maryam Hosseini, a postdoc in MIT’s City Form Lab in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), whose research has focused extensively on the development of the tool.

areas as initial sources of data, but it can be refined and adapted for use anywhere. The tool, called TILE2NET, has been developed using a few U.S. It seemed like a really important technology to develop, especially in an open-source way that can be used by other places.” The private sector hasn’t taken on the task of mapping it.

city governments know very little about their sidewalk networks. “In the urban planning and urban policy fields, this is a huge gap,” says Andres Sevtsuk, an associate professor at MIT and a co-author of a new paper detailing the tool’s capabilities. The tool can help planners, policymakers, and urbanists who want to expand pedestrian infrastructure.

Now MIT researchers, along with colleagues from multiple other universities, have developed an open-source tool that uses aerial imagery and image-recognition to create complete maps of sidewalks and crosswalks. do not have sidewalk maps, and pedestrians are usually left to fend for themselves: Can you walk from your hotel to the restaurants on the other side of the highway? Is there a shortcut from downtown to the sports arena? And how do you get to that bus stop, anyway? It’s easier than ever to view maps of any place you’d like to go - by car, that is.

The place where the sidewalk ends