Transforming satellite imagery into vector maps using modified GANs

Taparia, Aditya ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0004-4603-0085, Bashir, Ali Kashif ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2601-9327, Zhu, Yaodong ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4911-5522, Gdekallu, Thippa Reddy ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0097-801X and Nath, Keshab (2024) Transforming satellite imagery into vector maps using modified GANs. Alexandria Engineering Journal, 109. pp. 792-806. ISSN 1110-0168

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Abstract

Vector maps find widespread utility across diverse domains due to their capacity to not only store but also represent discrete data boundaries such as building footprints, disaster impact analysis, digitization, urban planning, location points, transport links, and more. Although extensive research exists on identifying building footprints and road types from satellite imagery, the generation of vector maps from such imagery remains an area with limited exploration. Furthermore, conventional map generation techniques rely on labor-intensive manual feature extraction or rule-based approaches, which impose inherent limitations. To surmount these limitations, we propose a novel method called HPix, which utilizes modified Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to generate vector tile map from satellite images. HPix incorporates two hierarchical frameworks: one operating at the global level and the other at the local level, resulting in a comprehensive model. Through empirical evaluations, our proposed approach showcases its effectiveness in producing highly accurate and visually captivating vector tile maps derived from satellite images. We achieved a pixel-level accuracy of 61.04% and an SSIM score of 0.75, outperforming all other existing methods. We further extend our study’s application to include mapping of road intersections and building footprints cluster based on their area. We also show usability of our proposed architecture as a general-purpose solutions in other tasks like edges-to-photo, BW-to-color, or labels-to-street scene.