Urban road mapping based on an end-to-end road vectorization mapping network framework

Abstract Reliable urban road vector maps are essential for urban analysis because the spatial distribution of road networks reflects urban development under the combined effects of nature and socio-economics. Diverse very high resolution (VHR) remote sensing images are now available, enabling explicit extraction of urban road vector maps over wide areas. Urban road vectorization mapping consists of two separate tasks: road extraction and road vectorization. The traditional methods focus on the road extraction task, and can obtain a good performance when using a pixel-based metric. However, the road vectorization methods are faced with the problem of road connectivity. In this work, to implement urban road vectorization mapping in a unified way, an end-to-end road vectorization mapping network (RVMNet) framework is proposed. The proposed RVMNet framework consists of a node proposal network (NPN) module and a node connectivity based road refinement module. In the NPN module, a fully convolutional network is adopted for the road node extraction. This improves the connectivity of the road mask by providing supervised information in the form of the road nodes, which are actually part of the road mask. The road mask is then converted into a road vector map by vectorization. In the node connectivity based road refinement module, road nodes are inserted into the road vector map to improve the connectivity. We compared RVMNet with the other state-of-the-art road detection methods on two public road datasets (SpaceNet 3 and DeepGlobe). The results of this comparison showed that combining road extraction and road vectorization into a unified framework is an efficient and accurate strategy for urban road vectorization mapping because it can propose road nodes that help to improve the road connectivity. Moreover, we constructed the novel UrbanRoadNet dataset, covering six cities (Beijing city center; Helsinki; Wuhan; Macao; the Wan Chai area of Hong Kong; and Shanghai). We then applied the RVMNet framework to the data from the six cities, obtaining an improvement in the vector-based average path length similarity (APLS) value of 4.1%. The spatial transfer assessments from both the qualitative and quantitative aspects corroborated the robust generalizability of the proposed method, and further verified the effectiveness of the proposed approach for large-scale road vectorization mapping at a very high resolution. It was also found that road vector spatial distribution is a useful way to reflect urban development.