UrbanVGGT: Scalable Sidewalk Width Estimation from Street View Images

TL;DR

UrbanVGGT introduces a scalable pipeline for estimating sidewalk widths from street view images, combining multiple computer vision techniques to produce accurate measurements and a new dataset across several cities.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel, scalable method for measuring sidewalk widths from street view images, addressing the scarcity of large-scale sidewalk data.

Findings

Mean absolute error of 0.252 m on Washington, D.C. benchmark

95.5% of estimates within 0.50 m of reference

Generated a sidewalk-width dataset covering 527 street segments

Abstract

Sidewalk width is an important indicator of pedestrian accessibility, comfort, and network quality, yet large-scale width data remain scarce in most cities. Existing approaches typically rely on costly field surveys, high-resolution overhead imagery, or simplified geometric assumptions that limit scalability or introduce systematic error. To address this gap, we present UrbanVGGT, a measurement pipeline for estimating metric sidewalk width from a single street-view image. The method combines semantic segmentation, feed-forward 3D reconstruction, adaptive ground-plane fitting, camera-height-based scale calibration, and directional width measurement on the recovered plane. On a ground-truth benchmark from Washington, D.C., UrbanVGGT achieves a mean absolute error of 0.252 m, with 95.5% of estimates within 0.50 m of the reference width. Ablation experiments show that metric scale calibration is the most critical component, and controlled comparisons with alternative geometry backbones support the effectiveness of the overall design. As a feasibility demonstration, we further apply the pipeline to three cities and generate SV-SideWidth, a prototype sidewalk-width dataset covering 527 OpenStreetMap street segments. The results indicate that street-view imagery can support scalable generation of candidate sidewalk-width attributes, while broader cross-city validation and local ground-truth auditing remain necessary before deployment as authoritative planning data.