Street Vendor Detection: Helping municipalities make decisions with actionable insights

Street vendors are quite common in countries across the world. By the prevalence of mobile surveillance systems, increasing demand for automatic detection of street vendors for further decisions and planning by the city administrators emerged. In this paper, an object detector is developed using a MobileNet SSD object detection algorithm to detect vendors on the street. For this study images were used, however, in the future this technique could be used for real time video footage from street cameras. Since this is the first study tackling this issue, a data set was created from scratch. The accuracy achieved by the algorithm is promising considering the size of the data set and the minimal computational power available. The goal of this research is to pave the way for more work to be done in this area and help municipalities improve their decision making process regarding street vendor activities in countries like Mexico, Pakistan, China, Turkey, etc.