Representation and modelling of the complexity of street intersections for navigation guidance

Abstract

There is growing recognition that the complexity of road intersections within navigation environments is a critical factor of wayfinding. A complex intersection can increase the difficulty of spatial cognition and environment perception for pedestrians, leading to wrong decision-making and deviated navigation. Existing methods quantify the complexity of a decision point by simply outputting a single value, thus fail to match the perceived content under different passage strategies. Besides, most methods merely include the structural or visual features, and rarely contain a comprehensive integration of multi-dimensional characteristics. This study proposes a passage strategy-based computational method to assess the complexity of road intersections with their perceptual contents of street scenes. Specifically, we analyze several types of real-world perceived features when crossing intersections. Then, develop a combination of conceptual features regarding the visual, structural and semantic aspects based on different route strategies (i.e., whether pedestrians focus on a particular branch as an entrance or an exit), to depict the perceived complexity features of the road intersections. This study provides further implication that the innovative method can be integrated into route planning and communication, and navigation guidance services in complex scenarios.