Green parks in urban areas are believed to enhance the well-being of residents. The importance of green spaces to support health and fitness in urban areas has recently regained interest. Reports released in 2010-2016 by the World Health Organization (WHO) on urban planning, environment, and health stated that green spaces can have a positive impact on physical activity, social and mental well-being, enhance air quality and decrease noise exposure. We analyzed the number of check-ins in various parks of Shanghai by utilizing geotagged social media network check-in data. This article presents a descriptive study using social media data by obtaining the three-year comparison of spatial and temporal patterns of park visits to raise public awareness that green parks provide a healthy environment that can be beneficial for the well-being of urban citizens. We investigated the visitor spatiotemporal behavior in more than 115 green parks in 10 districts of Shanghai with approximately 250,000 check-ins. We examined 3 years of geotagged data and our main findings are: (i) the spatial and temporal variations of users in urban green parks (ii) the gender differences in space and time with relation to urban green parks. The main objective of this article is to present evident data for policymakers on the advantages of providing green spaces access to urban citizens and to facilitate cities with systematic approaches to provide green space access to improve the health of urban citizens.

Urban green spaces promote outdoor activities and social interaction, which make a significant contribution to the health and well-being of residents. This study presents an approach that focuses on the real spatial and temporal behavior of park visitors in different categories of green parks. We used the large dataset available from the Chinese micro-blog Sina Weibo (often simply referred to as “Weibo”) to analyze data samples, in order to describe the behavioral patterns of millions of people with access to green spaces. We select Shanghai as a case study because urban residential segregation has already taken place, which was expected to be followed by concerns of environmental sustainability. In this research, we utilized social media check-in data to measure and compare the number of visitations to different kinds of green parks. Furthermore, we divided the green spaces into different categories according to their characteristics, and our main findings were: (1) the most popular category based upon the check-in data; (2) changes in the number of visitors according to the time of day; (3) seasonal impacts on behavior in public in relation to the different categories of parks; and (4) gender-based differences. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study carried out in Shanghai utilizing Weibo data to focus upon the categorization of green space. It is also the first to offer recommendations for planners regarding the type of facilities they should provide to residents in green spaces, and regarding the sustainability of urban environments and smart city architecture.

We consider the recent challenges of 3D shape analysis based on a volumetric CNN that requires a huge computational power. This high-cost approach forces to reduce the volume resolutions when applying 3D CNN on volumetric data. In this context, we propose a multiorientation volumetric deep neural network (MV-DNN) for 3D object classification with octree generating low-cost volumetric features. In comparison to conventional octree representations, we propose to limit the octree partition to a certain depth to reserve all leaf octants with sparsity features. This allows for improved learning of complex 3D features and increased prediction of object labels at both low and high resolutions. Our auxiliary learning approach predicts object classes based on the subvolume parts of a 3D object that improve the classification accuracy compared to other existing 3D volumetric CNN methods. In addition, the influence of views and depths of the 3D model on the classification performance is investigated through extensive experiments applied to the ModelNet40 database. Our deep learning framework runs significantly faster and consumes less memory than full voxel representations and demonstrate the effectiveness of our octree-based auxiliary learning approach for exploring high resolution 3D models. Experimental results reveal the superiority of our MV-DNN that achieves better classification accuracy compared to state-of-art methods on two public databases.

The main purpose of this research is to study the effect of various types of venues on the density distribution of residents and model check-in data from a Location-Based Social Network for the city of Shanghai, China by using combination of multiple temporal, spatial and visualization techniques by classifying users’ check-ins into different venue categories. This article investigates the use of Weibo for big data analysis and its efficiency in various categories instead of manually collected datasets, by exploring the relation between time, frequency, place and category of check-in based on location characteristics and their contributions. The data used in this research was acquired from a famous Chinese microblogs called Weibo, which was preprocessed to get the most significant and relevant attributes for the current study and transformed into Geographical Information Systems format, analyzed and, finally, presented with the help of graphs, tables and heat maps. The Kernel Density Estimation was used for spatial analysis. The venue categorization was based on nature of the physical locations within the city by comparing the name of venue extracted from Weibo dataset with the function such as education for schools or shopping for malls and so on. The results of usage patterns from hours to days, venue categories and frequency distribution into these categories as well as the density of check-in within the Shanghai and contribution of each venue category in its diversity are thoroughly demonstrated, uncovering interesting spatio-temporal patterns including frequency and density of users from different venues at different time intervals, and significance of using geo-data from Weibo to study human behavior in variety of studies like education, tourism and city dynamics based on location-based social networks. Our findings uncover various aspects of activity patterns in human behavior, the significance of venue classes and its effects in Shanghai, which can be applied in pattern analysis, recommendation systems and other interactive applications for these classes.

The advancement of low-cost RGB-D and LiDAR three-dimensional (3D) sensors has permitted the obtainment of the 3D model easier in real-time. However, making intricate 3D features is crucial for the advancement of 3D object classifications. The existing volumetric voxel-based CNN approaches have achieved remarkable progress, but they generate huge computational overhead that limits the extraction of global features at higher resolutions of 3D objects. In this paper, a low-cost 3D volumetric deep convolutional neural network is proposed for 3D object classification based on joint multiscale hierarchical and subvolume supervised learning strategies. Our proposed deep neural network inputs 3D data, which are preprocessed by implementing memory-efficient octree representation, and we propose to limit the full layer octree depth to a certain level based on the predefined input volume resolution for storing high-precision contour features. Multiscale features are concatenated from multilevel octree depths inside the network, aiming to adaptively generate high-level global features. The strategy of the subvolume supervision approach is to train the network on subparts of the 3D object in order to learn local features. Our framework has been evaluated with two publicly available 3D repositories. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method where the classification accuracy is improved in comparison to existing volumetric approaches, and the memory consumption ratio and run-time are significantly reduced.