People Flow Trend Estimation Approach and Quantitative Explanation Based on the Scene Level Deep Learning of Street View Images

People flow trend estimation is crucial to traffic and urban safety planning and management. However, owing to privacy concerns, the collection of individual location data for people flow statistical analysis is difficult; thus, an alternative approach is urgently needed. Furthermore, the trend in people flow is reflected in streetscape factors, yet the relationship between them remains unclear in the existing literature. To address this, we propose an end-to-end deep-learning approach that combines street view images and human subjective score of each street view. For a more detailed people flow study, estimation and analysis were implemented using different time and movement patterns. Consequently, we achieved a 78% accuracy on the test set. We also implemented the gradient-weighted class activation mapping deep learning visualization and L1 based statistical methods and proposed a quantitative analysis approach to understand the land scape elements and subjective feeling of street view and to identify the effective elements for the people flow estimation based on a gradient impact method. In summary, this study provides a novel end-to-end people flow trend estimation approach and sheds light on the relationship between streetscape, human subjective feeling, and people flow trend, thereby making an important contribution to the evaluation of existing urban development.