Visual Feature Encoding for GNNs on Road Networks
This work addresses road network analysis for urban planning or navigation, but it is incremental as it combines existing vision and GNN methods.
The paper tackles road type classification on Open Street Map networks by encoding satellite imagery with ResNet architectures into graph neural networks, showing that fine-tuning on a remote sensing dataset improves performance over ImageNet-pretrained models.
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.