Developing a Street View Imagery Processing Pipeline for Building-Level Vacant House Assessment

원문 초록

Street view imagery (SVI) is widely used to audit urban environments remotely. Automated assessments usually assume that each image shows the target building clearly. In practice, an image may lack task-relevant evidence or show a neighboring house. If this goes unchecked, a model's score cannot show whether it judged the correct building. We present a reproducible SVI processing pipeline that makes image suitability and target identity explicit and checkable. We apply it to vacant house assessment in South Korea, using 10,311 images of 1,609 detached-house parcels. Task-suitability filtering adapts its criteria to image composition and administrative area. This keeps coverage even across areas. While keeping as many images as a single uniform filter, our filtering left 101 more parcels with a usable image. Target-house alignment identifies the parcel's house from camera metadata and parcel boundaries. It needs no building footprints or additional training. Alignment matched human labels for 85.6% of images, compared with 79.8% for the best simple rule. In vacancy classification, filtering and alignment raised AUROC from 0.684 to 0.719, but marking a different house in the same image still gave 0.709. Grad-CAM showed that the model often looked at areas outside the target house. Image suitability, target identification, and model evidence are therefore separate problems, and scores alone do not resolve them. Recording which images were used and which house was selected lets reviewers verify each assessment and can support human virtual audits.