Street-level imagery dataset for the detection of informal vendors in urban environment
Keyla Garcia-Jaimes, John R. Ballesteros, John W. Branch · Data in Brief · 2025
Street vending is a prominent component of the informal economy, yet its prevalence remains poorly quantified due to the limitations of traditional survey methods, which are costly, invasive, and labor-intensive. To enable scalable, image-based assessments of this activity, we present the StreetVendor-SLI dataset, specifically designed for detecting vendors in urban environments. The dataset comprises 2794 high-resolution images (2416×1359 px), obtained from video footage recorded with a user grade camera mounted on a motorcycle. The original dataset contains 1397 images, with an average size of 5 MB per image, resulting in a total dataset size of 4.63 GB. Privacy compliance with GDPR guidelines was achieved by anonymizing pedestrian faces and vehicle license plates using an open-source YOLO object detection pipeline. Every image is annotated utilizing the YOLO format, with vendors enclosed in bounding boxes and classified into three categories: fixed-stall vendor (1774 labels), semi-fixed vendor (459 labels), and itinerant vendor (124 labels). To address class imbalance and enhance model generalization, data augmentation techniques-including geometric transformations (rotation, flipping, scaling, shearing) and spectral adjustments (brightness, contrast, hue)-were applied. The Steet-level Imagery dataset thus provides an openly available option for the detection of street vendors, offering a valuable resource for researchers studying informal economic activities and urban policies.