Patent ID: 8520940

Claim:
A computer implemented method of segmenting aerial imagery according to predefined regions, comprising: (a) generating a feature mask comprising road segments, using vector map data, for aerial image data corresponding to a geographic region of interest; (b) partitioning the aerial image data and corresponding feature mask into tiles, such that the data within a tile is suitably partitioned for parallel processing; (c) generating a color map for each tile, wherein the color map comprises a plurality of predefined regions in which each predefined region, defined by enclosing road segments, is assigned a single uniform color; (d) generating a composite color mapping for the entire geographic region of interest by comparing the color maps of adjacent tiles and reassigning colors as needed so that predefined regions, split by tile boundaries, become uniformly colored contiguously across tile boundaries thereby removing tile boundaries; and (e) generating a segmentation of the aerial imagery for the entire geographic region of interest by computing and storing bounding boxes for predefined regions in the composite color map after removing regions that are either too large or too small to be predefined regions.