Deep learning is revolutionizing the mapping industry. Under lightweight human curation, computer has generated almost half of the roads in Thailand on OpenStreetMap (OSM) using high-resolution aerial imagery. Bing maps are displaying 125 million computer-generated building polygons in the U.S. While tremendously more efficient than manual mapping, one cannot map out everything from the air. Especially for roads, a small prediction gap by image occlusion renders the entire road useless for routing. Misconnections can be more dangerous. Therefore computer-based mapping often requires local verifications, which is still labor intensive. In this paper, we propose to leverage crowdsourced GPS data to improve and support road extraction from aerial imagery. Through novel data augmentation, GPS rendering, and 1D transpose convolution techniques, we show almost 5 improvements over previous competition winning models, and much better robustness when predicting new areas without any new training data or domain adaptation.
Comparing to other computer vision applications, road mapping has little margin for error. Prediction gaps make the entire road useless for routing, and therefore have attracted lots of attention. Mnih noticed the problem early on and used Conditional Random Fields in post-processing to link broken roads @cite_2 . Another popular technique to link roads is shortest path search @cite_3 @cite_7 . Line Integral Convolution can smooth out broken roads in post-processing too @cite_0 . More recent works try to address the problem in prediction instead of post-processing, e.g., through a topology-aware loss function @cite_28 or through an iterative search process guided by CNNs @cite_10 . We must be careful to link roads because incorrect connections are more dangerous than missing connections in routing. Our approach complements the above mentioned methods because GPS data can confirm the connectivity or the absence of it regardless of image occlusion or other issues.
@cite_7 @cite_28 @cite_3 @cite_0 @cite_2 @cite_10
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In this paper, we propose a learning-based road network extraction scheme from high resolution satellite. First, the convolutional neural network(CNN), which is able to capture large context of local structures, are applied to predict the probability of a pixel belonging to road regions, and assign labels to each pixel to describe whether it is road. Then, a line integral convolution based algorithm is developed to smooth the rough map to connect small gaps. Finally, by combining with some common image processing operators, road centerlines are able to be acquired. Attribute to the learning capacity of CNN, and the line integral convolution based connection scheme, the proposed road extraction method is able to provide high quality results comparing to current state-of-art road extraction methods. We present a new approach for tracking roads from satellite images, and thereby illustrate a general computational strategy ("active testing") for tracking 1D structures and other recognition tasks in computer vision. Our approach is related to recent work in active vision on "where to look next" and motivated by the "divide-and-conquer" strategy of parlour games. We choose "tests" (matched filters for short road segments) one at a time in order to remove as much uncertainty as possible about the "true hypothesis" (road position) given the results of the previous tests. The tests are chosen online based on a statistical model for the joint distribution of tests and hypotheses. The problem of minimizing uncertainty (measured by entropy) is formulated in simple and explicit analytical terms. At each iteration new image data are examined and a new entropy minimization problem is solved (exactly), resulting in a new image location to inspect, and so forth. We report experiments using panchromatic SPOT satellite imagery with a ground resolution of ten meters. This paper describes a process for automatically inferring maps from large collections of opportunistically collected GPS traces. In this type of dataset, there is often a great disparity in terms of coverage. For example, a freeway may be represented by thousands of trips, whereas a residential road may only have a handful of observations. Additionally, while modern GPS receivers typically produce high-quality location estimates, errors over 100 meters are not uncommon, especially near tall buildings or under dense tree coverage. Combined, GPS trace disparity and error present a formidable challenge for the current state of the art in map inference. By tuning the parameters of existing algorithms, a user may choose to remove spurious roads created by GPS noise, or admit less-frequently traveled roads, but not both. In this paper, we present an extensible map inference pipeline, designed to mitigate GPS error, admit less-frequently traveled roads, and scale to large datasets. We demonstrate and compare the performance of our proposed pipeline against existing methods, both qualitatively and quantitatively, using a real-world dataset that includes both high disparity and noise. Our results show significant improvements over the current state of the art. Mapping road networks is currently both expensive and labor-intensive. High-resolution aerial imagery provides a promising avenue to automatically infer a road network. Prior work uses convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to detect which pixels belong to a road (segmentation), and then uses complex post-processing heuristics to infer graph connectivity. We show that these segmentation methods have high error rates because noisy CNN outputs are difficult to correct. We propose RoadTracer, a new method to automatically construct accurate road network maps from aerial images. RoadTracer uses an iterative search process guided by a CNN-based decision function to derive the road network graph directly from the output of the CNN. We compare our approach with a segmentation method on fifteen cities, and find that at a 5 error rate, RoadTracer correctly captures 45 more junctions across these cities.