Sidewalk Moments: Are Richer Representations Always More Human-Aligned? Evidence from City-Walk Videos

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2607.20903v1
• Date: Thu, 23 Jul 2026 03:54:34 GMT
• Title: Sidewalk Moments: Are Richer Representations Always More Human-Aligned? Evidence from City-Walk Videos
• Abstract summary: We examine whether richer visual representations yield more human-aligned measures of urban engagement.<n>We use 61 first-person city-walk videos from YouTube and represent them across four modalities: video features, temporally averaged images (TAIs), audio embedding and text-based semantic descriptions.
• Score: 4.7125066717595825
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: We examine whether richer visual representations yield more human-aligned measures of urban engagement, using 61 first-person city-walk videos from YouTube segmented into over 50,000 ten-second clips and represented across four modalities: spatiotemporal video features, temporally averaged images (TAIs), audio embeddings, and text-based semantic descriptions. Spearman correlation analysis reveals the expected ordering along the temporal-richness continuum, with video features showing the strongest continuous alignment. However, this ordering breaks down under binary classification of high- versus low-engagement moments (the paradigm most commonly used to train perceptual scoring models), where TAIs consistently match or outperform video across most classifiers and quantile thresholds. An independent two-alternative forced-choice study on Amazon Mechanical Turk confirms that this parity reflects human judgment: participants identified engaging moments with comparable accuracy from TAIs and full video clips, while text performed substantially worse and audio remained near chance. Gap analysis reveals a functional dissociation: video features are advantaged in activity-driven scenes with dynamic content, whereas TAIs better align with human judgments in composition-driven scenes dominated by stable spatial structure. These findings challenge the assumption that richer representations are inherently more human-aligned, and suggest that perceptually grounded temporal compression can be a principled alternative to full video encoding.

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