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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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. 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. In recent years scholars have built maps of science by connecting the academic fields that cite each other, are cited together, or that cite a similar literature. But since scholars cannot always publish in the fields they cite, or that cite them, these science maps are only rough proxies for the potential of a scholar, organization, or country, to enter a new academic field. Here we use a large dataset of scholarly publications disambiguated at the individual level to create a map of science-or research space-where links connect pairs of fields based on the probability that an individual has published in both of them. We find that the research space is a significantly more accurate predictor of the fields that individuals and organizations will enter in the future than citation based science maps. At the country level, however, the research space and citations based science maps are equally accurate. These findings show that data on career trajectories-the set of fields that individuals have previously published in-provide more accurate predictors of future research output for more focalized units-such as individuals or organizations-than citation based science maps. In a document network such as a citation network of scientific documents, web-logs, etc., the content produced by authors exhibits their interest in certain topics. In addition some authors influence other authors' interests. In this work, we propose to model the influence of cited authors along with the interests of citing authors. Moreover, we hypothesize that apart from the citations present in documents, the context surrounding the citation mention provides extra topical information about the cited authors. However, associating terms in the context to the cited authors remains an open problem. We propose novel document generation schemes that incorporate the context while simultaneously modeling the interests of citing authors and influence of the cited authors. Our experiments show significant improvements over baseline models for various evaluation criteria such as link prediction between document and cited author, and quantitatively explaining unseen text.