Pattern Recognition and Segmentation of Administrative Boundaries Using a One-Dimensional Convolutional Neural Network and Grid Shape Context Descriptor

Abstract

Recognizing morphological patterns in lines and segmenting them into homogeneous segments is critical for line generalization and other applications. Due to the excessive dependence on handcrafted features in existing methods and their insufficient consideration of contextual information, we propose a novel pattern recognition and segmentation method for lines, based on deep learning and shape context descriptors. In this method, a line is divided into a series of consecutive linear units of equal length, termed lixels. A grid shape context descriptor (GSCD) was designed to extract the contextual features for each lixel. A one-dimensional convolutional neural network (1D-U-Net) was constructed to classify the pattern type of each lixel, and adjacent lixels with the same pattern types were fused to obtain segmentation results. The proposed method was applied to administrative boundaries, which were segmented into components with three different patterns. The experiments showed that the lixel classification accuracy of the 1D-U-Net reached 90.42%. The consistency ratio was 92.41%, when compared with the manual segmentation results, which was higher than either of the two existing machine learning-based segmentation methods.