The influence of neighborhood quality on tourism in China: Using Baidu Street View pictures and deep learning techniques

Previous studies have investigated the determinants of urban tourism development from the various attributes of neighborhood quality. However, traditional methods to assess neighborhood quality are often subjective, costly, and only on a small scale. To fill this research gap, this study applies the recent development in big data of street view images, deep learning algorithms, and image processing technology to assess quantitatively four attributes of neighborhood quality, namely street facilities, architectural landscape, green or ecological environment, and scene visibility. The paper collects more than 7.8 million Baidu SVPs of 232 prefecture-level cities in China and applies deep learning techniques to recognize these images. This paper then tries to examine the influence of neighborhood quality on regional tourism development. Empirical results show that both levels of street facilities and greenery environment promote tourism. However, the construction intensity of the landscape has an inhibitory influence on the development of tourism. The threshold test shows that the intensity of the influence varies with the city’s overall economic level. These conclusions are of great significance for the development of China’s urban construction and tourism economy, and also provide a useful reference for policymakers. The methodological procedure is reduplicative and can be applied to other challenging cases.