Large-scale integration of remotely sensed and GIS road networks: A full image-vector conflation approach based on optimization and deep learning

Road networks play an important role in the sustainable development of human society. Conventionally, there are two sources of road data acquisition: road extraction from Remote Sensing (RS) imagery and GIS based map production. Each method has its limitations. The RS road extraction methods are primarily raster-based and the extracted roads are not directly usable in GIS due to their fragmented and noisy nature, while vector-based methods cannot utilize rich raster information. Further more, the vector and raster data can have discrepancies for various reasons. Efficient road data production requires an image-vector conflation process that can match and combine raster and vector-based road data automatically.

In this study, we propose a full image-vector conflation framework that directly integrates image and vector road data by appropriately transforming extracted roads from imagery and establishing a match relation between these roads and a credible target GIS road dataset. Based on analyzing these match relations, we propose new metrics for measuring the degree of agreement between the raster and vector road data. The proposed framework combines state-of-the-art deep learning methods for image segmentation and optimization-based models for object matching. We prepared a large-scale high-resolution road dataset covering two counties in Kansas, US. Using trained models from one of the two counties, we were able to extract road segments in the other county and match them to the TIGER/Line roads.

Our experiments show that conventional performance metrics for road extraction (e.g. IoU) are insufficient for measuring the degree of agreement between image and vector roads as they are pixel-based and are too sensitive to spatial displacement. Instead, the newly defined vector-based agreement metrics are needed for image-vector conflation purposes. Experiments show that, by the vector-based metrics, nearly 90% of GIS road lengths in the study area were extracted and over 90% of extracted roads matched the target GIS roads. The new framework streamlines raster-vector conflation of roads and can potentially expedite relevant geospatial analyses regarding change detection, disaster monitoring and GIS data production, among others.