Urban zoning using higher-order markov random fields on multi-view imagery data

Abstract

Urban zoning enables various applications in land use analysis and urban planning. As cities evolve, it is important to constantly update the zoning maps of cities to reflect urban pattern changes. This paper proposes a method for automatic urban zoning using higher-order Markov random fields (HO-MRF) built on multi-view imagery data including street-view photos and top-view satellite images. In the proposed HO-MRF, top-view satellite data is segmented via a multi-scale deep convolutional neural network (MS-CNN) and used in lower-order potentials. Street-view data with geo-tagged information is augmented in higher-order potentials. Various feature types for classifying street-view images were also investigated in our work. We evaluated the proposed method on a number of famous metropolises and provided in-depth analysis on technical issues.