What AI technologies can help extract more information from urban images? What do signs tell us about the city? What types of information signs can add to our understanding of the city(Cultural, Financial, Temporary, Informal, Lexicon…)?
The research methodology consists of two steps: first, web-scraping to gather Street View images from Google Maps of the designated research site; second, analyzing these images using Deep Learning algorithms to classify the signs. After classification, the sign areas are extracted for further analysis. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) algorithms are then employed to decipher the content and language displayed in the signs.
