Regularized Primitive Graph Learning for Unified Vector Mapping

Large-scale vector mapping is the foundation for transportation and urban planning. Most existing mapping methods are tailored to one specific mapping task, due to task-specific requirements on shape regularization and topology reconstruction. We propose GraphMapper, a unified framework for end-to-end vector map extraction from satellite images. Our key idea is using primitive graph as a unified representation of vector maps and formulating shape regularization and topology reconstruction as primitive graph reconstruction problems that can be solved in the same framework. Specifically, shape regularization is modeled as the consistency between primitive directions and their pairwise relationship. Based on the primitive graph, we design a learning approach to reconstruct primitive graphs in multiple stages. GraphMapper can fully explore primitive-wise and pairwise information for shape regularization and topology reconstruction, resulting improved primitive graph learning capabilities. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of GraphMapper on two challenging mapping tasks for building footprints and road networks. With the premise of sharing the majority design of the architecture and a few task-specific designs, our model outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both tasks on public benchmarks. Our code will be publicly available.