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Neural Turtle Graphics for Modeling City Road Layouts (arxiv.org)
2 points by ArtWomb on Oct 7, 2019 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Like a turtle drawing with a pen, it grows a city map one road segment at a time, each new piece attached to and shaped by roads drawn before. It beat earlier road generators and can copy a city's style or finish a sketched map.

Abstract

We propose Neural Turtle Graphics (NTG), a novel generative model for spatial graphs, and demonstrate its applications in modeling city road layouts. Specifically, we represent the road layout using a graph where nodes in the graph represent control points and edges in the graph represent road segments. NTG is a sequential generative model parameterized by a neural network. It iteratively generates a new node and an edge connecting to an existing node conditioned on the current graph. We train NTG on Open Street Map data and show that it outperforms existing approaches using a set of diverse performance metrics. Moreover, our method allows users to control styles of generated road layouts mimicking existing cities as well as to sketch parts of the city road layout to be synthesized. In addition to synthesis, the proposed NTG finds uses in an analytical task of aerial road parsing. Experimental results show that it achieves state-of-the-art performance on the SpaceNet dataset.

Hang Chu, Daiqing Li, David Acuna, Amlan Kar, Maria Shugrina, Xinkai Wei, Ming-Yu Liu, Antonio Torralba, Sanja Fidler
arXiv:1910.02055 · cs.CV, cs.GR, cs.LG · submitted Oct 4, 2019
abstract · pdf · html · ICCV-2019 Oral

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