
Automatic detection of road intersections is an important task in various domains such as navigation, route planning, traffic prediction, and road network extraction. Road intersections range from simple three-way T-junctions to complex large-scale junctions with many branches. The location of intersections is an important consideration for vulnerable road users such as People with Blindness or Visually Impairment (PBVI) or children. Route planning applications, however, do not give information about the location of intersections as this information is not available at scale. As a first step to solving this problem, a mechanism for automatically mapping road intersection locations is required, ideally using a globally available data source.In this paper, we propose a deep learning framework to automatically detect the location of intersections from satellite images using convolutional neural networks. For this purpose, we labelled 7,342 Google maps images from Washington, DC, USA to create a dataset. This dataset covers a region of 58.98 km2 and has 7,548 intersections. We then applied a recent object detection model (EfficientDet) to detect the location of intersections. Experiments based on the road network in Washington, DC, show that the accuracy of our model is within 5 meters for 88.6% of the predicted intersections. Most of our predicted centre of the intersections (approx 80%) are within 2 metres of the ground truth centre. Using hybrid images, we obtained an average recall and an average precision of 76.5% and 82.8% respectively, computed for values of Intersection Over Union (IOU) from 0.5 to 0.95, step 0.05. We have published an automation script to enable the reproduction of our dataset for other researchers.
Artificial intelligence, 000, deep learning framework, intersections, People with Blindness or Vision Impairment (PBVI), Computer Sciences, Computing methodologies, 004, Computer vision tasks, convolutional neural networks, Computer vision, Computer Engineering, vulnerable road users
Artificial intelligence, 000, deep learning framework, intersections, People with Blindness or Vision Impairment (PBVI), Computer Sciences, Computing methodologies, 004, Computer vision tasks, convolutional neural networks, Computer vision, Computer Engineering, vulnerable road users
| selected citations These citations are derived from selected sources. This is an alternative to the "Influence" indicator, which also reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically). | 2 | |
| popularity This indicator reflects the "current" impact/attention (the "hype") of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network. | Average | |
| influence This indicator reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically). | Average | |
| impulse This indicator reflects the initial momentum of an article directly after its publication, based on the underlying citation network. | Average |
