Detecting interchanges in road networks using a graph convolutional network approach

Detecting interchanges in road networks benefit many applications, such as vehicle navigation and map generalization. Traditional approaches use manually defined rules based on geometric, topological, or both properties, and thus can present challenges for structurally complex interchange. To overcome this drawback, we propose a graph-based deep learning approach for interchange detection. First, we model the road network as a graph in which the nodes represent road segments, and the edges represent their connections. The proposed approach computes the shape measures and contextual properties of individual road segments for features characterizing the associated nodes in the graph. Next, a semi-supervised approach uses these features and limited labeled interchanges to train a graph convolutional network that classifies these road segments into an interchange and non-interchange segments. Finally, an adaptive clustering approach groups the detected interchange segments into interchanges. Our experiment with the road networks of Beijing and Wuhan achieved a classification accuracy >95% at a label rate of 10%. Moreover, the interchange detection precision and recall were 79.6 and 75.7% on the Beijing dataset and 80.6 and 74.8% on the Wuhan dataset, respectively, which were 18.3-36.1 and 17.4-19.4% higher than those of the existing approaches based on characteristic node clustering.