Colloq: Edward Glaeser & Nikhil Naik

Visualizing the City

Google Streetview now provides an enormously rich picture of the physical streetscapes of the world's cities. Advances in computer recognition techniques make it possible to use images to predict local demographics or the curb appeal of particular places. We show how the combination of Google Streetview and computer vision techniques can map the patterns of neighborhood in six American cities. We also use these methods to predict income in the U.S. and Chile, which offers the possibility of measuring neighborhood prosperity in parts of the world where income statistics are absent.