Street View Data Collection Design for Disaster Reconnaissance

TL;DR

This paper details a comprehensive method for collecting and publishing longitudinal street-view imagery data post-disaster, highlighting challenges faced and providing recommendations for future data collection efforts.

Contribution

It introduces a systematic approach for disaster-related street-view data collection and sharing, emphasizing longitudinal data generation and addressing practical challenges.

Findings

Successful generation of longitudinal street-view data post-disaster

Identification of challenges in data consistency and volume management

Recommendations for future disaster-related street-view data collection

Abstract

Over the last decade, street-view type images have been used across disciplines to generate and understand various place-based metrics. However efforts to collect this data were often meant to support investigator-driven research without regard to the utility of the data for other researchers. To address this, we describe our methods for collecting and publishing longitudinal data of this type in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and discuss some of the challenges we encountered along the way. Our process included designing a route taking into account both broad area canvassing and community capitals transects. We also implemented procedures for uploading and publishing data from each survey. Our methods successfully generated the kind of longitudinal data that can be beneficial to a variety of research disciplines. However, there were some challenges with data collection consistency and the sheer magnitude of data produced. Overall, our approach demonstrates the feasibility of generating longitudinal street-view data in the wake of a disaster event. Based on our experience, we provide recommendations for future researchers attempting to create a similar data set.