A linear tessellation model to identify spatial pattern in urban street networks

Street patterns reflect the distribution characteristics of a street network and affect the urban structure and human behavior. The recognition of street patterns has been a topic of interest for decades. In this study, a linear tessellation model is proposed to identify the spatial patterns in street networks. The street segments are broken into consecutive linear units with equal length. We define five focal operations using neighborhood analysis to extract the geometric and topological characteristics of each linear unit for the purpose of grid-pattern recognition. These are then classified by Support Vector Machine, and the result is optimized based on Gestalt principles. The experimental results demonstrate that our method is effective for mining grid patterns in a street network.