synthetic geospatial image
Conditional Generation of Synthetic Geospatial Images from Pixel-level and Feature-level Inputs
Xiao, Xuerong, Ganguli, Swetava, Pandey, Vipul
Dearth of labeled data for training supervised deep learning models for real-world applications of computer vision plagues the large-scale deployment of machine learning models in many domains; including problems in geospatial analysis and remote sensing. As an example, detecting infrequent events or changes like road closures, road blocks, junctions changing to roundabouts, temporary turn restrictions, etc. are critical to keep a geospatial mapping service up-to-date in real-time and can significantly improve user experience and above all, user safety. Obtaining labels to train supervised models to detect infrequent mobility change events is expensive in time and money for a multitude of reasons [13]. An inexpensive solution is synthetic generation of training data and labels based on user-provided conditional inputs that can be easily manipulated. In [13], we propose a novel deep conditional generative model that can synthetically generate various types of semantically rich, imagelike representations of GPS trajectory data (e.g., CRM, HCRM discussed below) by conditioning simultaneously on pixel-level (e.g, road network) and feature-level (e.g., desired observation time interval) conditional inputs. Detection (e.g., pedestrian crosswalks, road centerlines) and classification (e.g, landcover, vegetation) of geospatial features are routinely cast as canonical tasks in computer vision such as object detection, semantic segmentation, instance segmentation, etc. Analogously, detecting locations affected by the aforementioned changes in mobility can be cast as a semantic segmentation task from image-like representations of privacy-preserving GPS trajectory datasets [13]. Consider a raster representation of the earth's surface created with zoom-24 tiles [3]. Any contiguous set of n n tiles can be considered as an n n image whose pixels are the associated zoom-24 tiles. A count-based raster map (CRM) is a single-channel image-like representation where the value of each pixel is the number of GPS trace occurrences in the zoom-24 tile corresponding to the pixel, counted over all trajectories during an observation time interval, τ t.