C-IMAGE: city cognitive mapping through geo-tagged photos

Traditional research categorizes people’s perceptions towards city into Kevin Lynch’s five elements: node, path, edge, district, and landmark. However, enabled by the proliferation of crowd sourced data this paper utilizes geo-tagged photos to detect, measure, and analyze people’s perceptions. This paper introduces a project called C-IMAGE, which analyzes the interactions between city and human perception through the massive amount of photos taken in 26 different cities: one based on the metadata and the other based on image content. Important discoveries through them include that (1) C-IMAGE can partially confirm Kevin Lynch’s city image efficiently; (2) There are mainly four prototypes among the tested 26 cities, based on the 7 urban perceptions based C-IMAGE; (3) C-IMAGE shows the gap between subjective perceptions and objective environment while compared to traditional urban indicators.