Rapid Quantification of Outdoor Object Visibility in Urban Setting Using Connected-Vehicle Fields of View

Abstract

Identifying locations that offer maximum visual exposure to passing vehicular traffic is a core problem in urban analytics, with applications spanning urban design, navigation, location-based services, and the placement of street-level assets. Traditional site selection methods often rely on static traffic counts or subjective assessments. This research introduces a data-driven methodology to objectively quantify location visibility by analyzing large-scale connected vehicle trajectory data within urban environments. We model the dynamic driver field-of-view using a forward-projected visibility area for each vehicle position derived from interpolated trajectories. By integrating this with building vertex locations extracted from OpenStreetMap, we quantify the cumulative visual exposure, or ``visibility count'', for thousands of potential points of interest along roadways. The core technical contribution involves the construction of a BallTree spatial index over building vertices. This enables highly efficient (O(logN) complexity) radius queries to determine which vertices fall within the viewing circles of millions of trajectory points across numerous trips, significantly outperforming brute-force geometric checks. Analysis reveals two key findings: 1) Visibility is highly concentrated, identifying distinct 'visual hotspots' receiving disproportionately high exposure compared to average locations. 2) The aggregated visibility counts across vertices conform to a Log-Normal distribution.