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Discovering Underground Maps from Fashion (arxiv.org)
2 points by PaulHoule on Feb 16, 2022 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: By grouping city areas that look alike in how people dress in public photos, this builds hidden neighborhood maps without any labels. Across 37 cities, human judges and maps made from other data agreed the groupings were good.

Abstract

The fashion sense -- meaning the clothing styles people wear -- in a geographical region can reveal information about that region. For example, it can reflect the kind of activities people do there, or the type of crowds that frequently visit the region (e.g., tourist hot spot, student neighborhood, business center). We propose a method to automatically create underground neighborhood maps of cities by analyzing how people dress. Using publicly available images from across a city, our method finds neighborhoods with a similar fashion sense and segments the map without supervision. For 37 cities worldwide, we show promising results in creating good underground maps, as evaluated using experiments with human judges and underground map benchmarks derived from non-image data. Our approach further allows detecting distinct neighborhoods (what is the most unique region of LA?) and answering analogy questions between cities (what is the "Downtown LA" of Bogota?).

Utkarsh Mall, Kavita Bala, Tamara Berg, Kristen Grauman
arXiv:2012.02897 · cs.CV · submitted Dec 4, 2020
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