Bird Eye-View to Street-View: A Survey
This is an incremental survey identifying gaps in a domain-specific task for urban analytics and geospatial data users.
This survey reviewed 20 recent papers on synthesizing street-view images from satellite images, finding that current methods fail to generate detailed and diverse images due to outdated deep learning techniques.
In recent years, street view imagery has grown to become one of the most important sources of geospatial data collection and urban analytics, which facilitates generating meaningful insights and assisting in decision-making. Synthesizing a street-view image from its corresponding satellite image is a challenging task due to the significant differences in appearance and viewpoint between the two domains. In this study, we screened 20 recent research papers to provide a thorough review of the state-of-the-art of how street-view images are synthesized from their corresponding satellite counterparts. The main findings are: (i) novel deep learning techniques are required for synthesizing more realistic and accurate street-view images; (ii) more datasets need to be collected for public usage; and (iii) more specific evaluation metrics need to be investigated for evaluating the generated images appropriately. We conclude that, due to applying outdated deep learning techniques, the recent literature failed to generate detailed and diverse street-view images.