Computer Vision

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The Promise and Peril of Using Visual AI to Study Cities

How AI Sees the City: Urban Visual Intelligence,” a new Routledge book from the MIT Senseable City Lab and Peking University, argues that visual AI can turn the images cities already produce into detailed data on traffic, emissions, greenery and public space. MIT research in New York used 331 traffic cameras to show congestion pricing cut traffic by about 10% but emissions by 16% to 22%. The authors also warn of surveillance and bias. This article explains the method, the findings, the risks and the questions to ask before deploying visual AI in public spaces.

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AI Still Isn’t as Good at Recognizing Objects as People Are, New Test Shows

A study by Mugihiko Kato and Biyu J. He of New York University, published in iScience on 17 September 2026, built an image set that systematically untangles global shape, internal parts and texture, then compared human viewers against more than 200 deep neural networks. No model reproduced the human cue-reliance profile, and every model tested substantially underperformed people when global shape was the only usable cue. This article covers the design, the finding that brain-alignment scores did not predict behavioural alignment, which model families came closest, and what the result means for autonomous driving, robotics and assistive devices.

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AI-Powered VR Helps Planners Design Better Cities

A 14-page paper from the School of Art at East China Jiaotong University became the headline “AI-powered VR helps planners design better cities”. We read its 225-word abstract and the publisher’s 215-word research note. The abstract reports four measured results, including a 0.034-metre median geometric error. The note quotes none of them, and neither text says any planner used the tool.

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MS-COCO Has Every Annotation Error Type and No Error Count: The Gap in Object Detection’s Top Benchmark

MS-COCO is the benchmark almost every object detector reports against, and a new Sejong University survey has just published a table that flags it for all seven annotation error types it defines. The same survey publishes a second table that counts errors in six benchmarks by hand. MS-COCO is not in it. That combination — […]

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