Intelligent evaluation of urban streetscape designs by analysing pedestrian body dynamics

This study describes a new approach for pedestrian behaviour analysis in simulated urban environments. A software system was developed to analyse the dynamics of pedestrians with a focus on their movement trajectories and the angle between the pedestrian´s movement vector and their gaze vector. One-class support vector machines and dynamic time warping were applied for outlier detection in order to indentify noticeable changes in the visual behavior of individuals in a group of simulated pedestrians who walk past visually attractive objects. Results of simulation experiments demonstrate how different pedestrian behaviour characteristics can be detected and distinguished in a variety of abstract urban design scenarios. The described software system was designed to allow future real world applications by feeding video recordings of real pedestrians into the model.