Consistency-Aware Map Generation at Multiple Zoom Levels Using Aerial Image

Abstract

The multilevel tiled map service is widely used and serves as a kind of digital infrastructure. These map tiles are usually rendered from vector data, whose update needs to walk or drive with professional equipment to check every point of interest. This leads to inconvenience and expensive cost in timely updating maps. Compared with vector data, aerial images are much easier and cheaper to obtain. In this article, we propose a novel multilevel map (MLM) generation framework that can automatically generate accurate and consistent maps with multiple zoom levels from aerial images. It consists of a level-aware map generator and a consistency-aware map generator. The level-aware map generator is able to generate accurate initial maps with realistic details for each zoom level. The consistency-aware map generator regards the initial maps at each zoom level as a sequence and builds the connection between them, so as to guarantee content consistency between maps at different zoom levels. Furthermore, we collect a large-scale high-quality dataset called MLM for map generation at multiple zoom levels. Experiments on our MLM dataset show that our method outperforms the previous state-of-the-art map generation methods on both comprehensive quantitative metrics and perceptual quality.