  Urban flow monitoring systems play important roles in smart city efforts
around the world. However, the ubiquitous deployment of monitoring devices,
such as CCTVs, induces a long-lasting and enormous cost for maintenance and
operation. This suggests the need for a technology that can reduce the number
of deployed devices, while preventing the degeneration of data accuracy and
granularity. In this paper, we aim to infer the real-time and fine-grained
crowd flows throughout a city based on coarse-grained observations. This task
is challenging due to two reasons: the spatial correlations between coarse- and
fine-grained urban flows, and the complexities of external impacts. To tackle
these issues, we develop a method entitled UrbanFM based on deep neural
networks. Our model consists of two major parts: 1) an inference network to
generate fine-grained flow distributions from coarse-grained inputs by using a
feature extraction module and a novel distributional upsampling module; 2) a
general fusion subnet to further boost the performance by considering the
influences of different external factors. Extensive experiments on two
real-world datasets, namely TaxiBJ and HappyValley, validate the effectiveness
and efficiency of our method compared to seven baselines, demonstrating the
state-of-the-art performance of our approach on the fine-grained urban flow
inference problem.
