A graph deep learning approach for urban building grouping

Identifying the spatial configurations of buildings and grouping them reasonably is an important task in cartography. This study developed a grouping approach using graph deep learning by integrating multiple cognitive features and manual cartographic experiences. Taking building center points as nodes, adjacent buildings were organized as a graph in which cognitive variables including size, orientation, and shape were defined for each node. Then, a learning model combining the graph convolution and neural network was designed to analyse the adjacent buildings modelled by the graph. The center points of groups were used as labels to train the positions of graph nodes and finally, a k-means algorithm was employed to obtain the grouping results based on the predicted node positions. Experiments confirmed that our approach can extract the inherent features describing the grouping relationship between buildings and performed better than two existing approaches referring to the ARI index (from 0.647 to 0.749).