A Machine Learning Approach to Recognize Environmental Features Associated with Social Factors

In this thesis we aim to supplement the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool (CE JST), which assists federal agencies in identifying disadvantaged census tracts, by extracting five environmental features from Google Street View (GSV) images. The five environmental features are garbage bags, greenery, and three distinct road damage types (longitudinal, transverse, and alligator cracks), which were identified using image classification, object detection, and image segmentation. We evaluate three cities using this developed feature space in order to distinguish between disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged census tracts. The results of the analysis reveal the significance of the feature space and demonstrate the time efficiency, detail, and cost-effectiveness of the proposed methodology.