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Public spaces in Northern Ireland (NI) are often demarcated with flags, emblems and symbols to express political allegiances but many in this divided society perceive them as intimidating. Our programme of research is to describe the spatial distribution of public expressions of cultural identity and to quantify the welfare costs of displays especially on house prices and mental health.
There are three stages to this work: (a) Street View Imagery (SVI) retrieval (b) object detection analysis and (c) regression analysis.
We have analysed 2 million images for the 50 largest NI towns using Google Street View’s (GSV) Static API. We collected current panoramas at 25m intervals along street networks with images for each panorama at 6 different camera rotations. Images were captured in 2022/23 and are typically March-August.
Object detection was performed using Grounding DINO zero-shot detection model (Liu et al., 2023).
Some early results.
Fig A :Sum of flags by Small Area
Fig B : Flags at each point in Belfast street network
Our research questions :
Are flag displays especially those supporting proscribed organisations more common near interfaces, places of worship, school and public services?
Do flag displays discourage buyers and lower house prices?
Do flag displays worsen individual mental health ?
Do flag displays encourage householders to move?
Does the visual environment affect labour mobility ?
Next steps :
Classify flags by type
Analyse historic images
Detect painted kerbs, murals, graffiti keywords and paramilitary memorials
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