Effective building pattern recognition is critical for understanding urban form, automating map generalization, and visualizing 3D city models. Most existing studies use object-independent methods based on visual perception rules and proximity graph models to extract patterns. However, because human vision is a part-based system, pattern recognition may require decomposing shapes into parts or grouping them into clusters. Existing methods may not recognize all visually aware patterns, and the proximity graph model can be inefficient. To improve efficiency and effectiveness, we integrate multi-scale data using a knowledge graph, focusing on the recognition of C-shaped building patterns. First, we use a property graph to represent the relationships between buildings within and across different scales involved in C-shaped building pattern recognition. Next, we store this knowledge graph in a graph database and convert the rules for C-shaped pattern recognition and enrichment into query conditions. Finally, we recognize and enrich C-shaped building patterns using rule-based reasoning in the built knowledge graph. We verify the effectiveness of our method using multi-scale data with three levels of detail (LODs) collected from the Gaode Map. Our results show that our method achieves a higher recall rate of 26.4% for LOD1, 20.0% for LOD2, and 9.1% for LOD3 compared to existing approaches. We also achieve recognition efficiency improvements of 0.91, 1.37, and 9.35 times, respectively.

Graph learning methods, especially graph convolutional networks, have been investigated for their potential applicability in many fields of study based on topological data. Their topological data processing capabilities have proven to be powerful. However, the relationships among separate entities include not only topological adjacency, but also correlation in vision, for example, the spatial vector data of buildings. In this study, we propose a spatial adaptive algorithm framework with a data-driven design to accomplish building group division and building group pattern recognition tasks, which is not sensitive to the difference in the spatial distribution of the buildings in various geographical regions. In addition, the algorithm framework has a multi-stage design, and processes the building group data from whole to parts, since the objective is closely related to multi-object detection on topological data.