Patched Line Segment Learning for Vector Road Mapping
Jiakun Xu Bowen Xu Gui-Song Xia Liang Dong Nan Xue
This paper presents a novel approach to computing vector road maps from
satellite remotely sensed images, building upon a well-defined Patched Line
Segment (PaLiS) representation for road graphs that holds geometric
significance. Unlike prevailing methods that derive road vector representations
from satellite images using binary masks or keypoints, our method employs line
segments. These segments not only convey road locations but also capture their
orientations, making them a robust choice for representation. More precisely,
given an input image, we divide it into non-overlapping patches and predict a
suitable line segment within each patch. This strategy enables us to capture
spatial and structural cues from these patch-based line segments, simplifying
the process of constructing the road network graph without the necessity of
additional neural networks for connectivity. In our experiments, we demonstrate
how an effective representation of a road graph significantly enhances the
performance of vector road mapping on established benchmarks, without requiring
extensive modifications to the neural network architecture. Furthermore, our
method achieves state-of-the-art performance with just 6 GPU hours of training,
leading to a substantial 32-fold reduction in training costs in terms of GPU
hours.