Visual Feature Encoding for GNNs on Road Networks

In this work, we present a novel approach to learning an encoding of visual features into graph neural networks with the application on road network data. We propose an architecture that combines state-of-the-art vision backbone networks with graph neural networks. More specifically, we perform a road type classification task on an Open Street Map road network through encoding of satellite imagery using various ResNet architectures. Our architecture further enables fine-tuning and a transfer-learning approach is evaluated by pretraining on the NWPU-RESISC45 image classification dataset for remote sensing and comparing them to purely ImageNet-pretrained ResNet models as visual feature encoders. The results show not only that the visual feature encoders are superior to low-level visual features, but also that the fine-tuning of the visual feature encoder to a general remote sensing dataset such as NWPU-RESISC45 can further improve the performance of a GNN on a machine learning task like road type classification.

Learning to integrate vision data into road network data

Road networks are the core infrastructure for connected and autonomous vehicles, but creating meaningful representations for machine learning applications is a challenging task. In this work, we propose to integrate remote sensing vision data into road network data for improved embeddings with graph neural networks. We present a segmentation of road edges based on spatio-temporal road and traffic characteristics, which allows to enrich the attribute set of road networks with visual features of satellite imagery and digital surface models. We show that both, the segmentation and the integration of vision data can increase performance on a road type classification task, and we achieve state-of-the-art performance on the OSM+DiDi Chuxing dataset on Chengdu, China.

Graph Representation Learning for Road Type Classification

We present a novel learning-based approach to graph representations of road networks employing state-of-the-art graph convolutional neural networks. Our approach is applied to realistic road networks of 17 cities from Open Street Map. While edge features are crucial to generate descriptive graph representations of road networks, graph convolutional networks usually rely on node features only. We show that the highly representative edge features can still be integrated into such networks by applying a line graph transformation. We also propose a method for neighborhood sampling based on a topological neighborhood composed of both local and global neighbors. We compare the performance of learning representations using different types of neighborhood aggregation functions in transductive and inductive tasks and in supervised and unsupervised learning. Furthermore, we propose a novel aggregation approach, Graph Attention Isomorphism Network, GAIN. Our results show that GAIN outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the road type classification problem.