VFF: Urban Panorama: Interfaces into Historic Urban Street-level Photography

In the last two decades, historians have increasingly employed GIS to understand urban and spatial change. The Urban Panorama Project aims to introduce a new dimension in the historical assessment of how cities change. By shifting the focus from geometric parcels, as seen from the air, to images of streetscapes, as seen at the street level, we intend to move closer to the perspective of the people experiencing change in the space of the city as they traverse its streets and avenues. With our colleagues in the Visual Narrative Cluster at NCSU, we have been testing different computer vision and machine learning techniques, and unique interactive interfaces, to assess historical and present-day images of streetscapes. We will discuss some of these efforts, mention relevant related projects by others, and specifically focus on an interactive tool we are currently developing, our t-SNE Street Feature Mapping Tool.