Quality of Life Prediction on Walking Scenes Using Deep Neural Networks and Performance Improvement Using Knowledge Distillation

The well-being of residents is a top priority for megacities, which is why urban design and sustainable development are crucial topics. Quality of Life (QoL) is used as an effective key performance index (KPI) to measure the efficiency of a city plan's quantity and quality factors. For city dwellers, QoL for pedestrians is also significant. The walkability concept evaluates and analyzes the QoL in a walking scene. However, the traditional questionnaire survey approach is costly, time-consuming, and limited in its evaluation area. To overcome these limitations, the paper proposes using artificial intelligence (AI) technology to evaluate walkability data collected through a questionnaire survey using virtual reality (VR) tools. The proposed method involves knowledge extraction using deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) for information extraction and deep learning (DL) models to infer QoL scores. Knowledge distillation (KD) is also applied to reduce the model size and improve real-time performance. The experiment results demonstrate that the proposed approach is practical and can be considered an alternative method for acquiring QoL.