# UrbanVGGT: Scalable Sidewalk Width Estimation from Street View Images

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.22531 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.22531/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 19 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [DUSt3R: Geometric 3D Vision Made Easy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14132/) (2023)
- [Depth Anything V2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09414/) (2024)
- [Continuous 3D Perception Model with Persistent State](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12387/) (2025)
- [Depth Pro: Sharp Monocular Metric Depth in Less Than a Second](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02073/) (2024)
- [Streetscape Analysis with Generative AI (SAGAI): Vision-Language Assessment and Mapping of Urban Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16538/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Sidewalk width is an important indicator of pedestrian accessibility, comfort, and network quality, yet large-scale width data remain scarce in most cities. Existing approaches typically rely on costly field surveys, high-resolution overhead imagery, or simplified geometric assumptions that limit scalability or introduce systematic error. To address this gap, we present UrbanVGGT, a measurement pipeline for estimating metric sidewalk width from a single street-view image. The method combines semantic segmentation, feed-forward 3D reconstruction, adaptive ground-plane fitting, camera-height-based scale calibration, and directional width measurement on the recovered plane. On a ground-truth benchmark from Washington, D.C., UrbanVGGT achieves a mean absolute error of 0.252 m, with 95.5% of estimates within 0.50 m of the reference width. Ablation experiments show that metric scale calibration is the most critical component, and controlled comparisons with alternative geometry backbones support the effectiveness of the overall design. As a feasibility demonstration, we further apply the pipeline to three cities and generate SV-SideWidth, a prototype sidewalk-width dataset covering 527 OpenStreetMap street segments. The results indicate that street-view imagery can support scalable generation of candidate sidewalk-width attributes, while broader cross-city validation and local ground-truth auditing remain necessary before deployment as authoritative planning data.
