Objectives  The registration of remote sensing image data and GIS (geographic information system) vector data is the basis of the integration of remote sensing and GIS, which is widely used in the fields of map data update, city monitoring, map change detection and so on. At present, the key to the registration of remote sensing images and vector data is the extraction of remote sensing image features. However, the existing remote sensing image feature extraction has problems such as incomplete feature extraction, which leads to registration failure or low accuracy. This paper proposes a registration method for remote sensing images and vector data based on Mask region-based convolutional neural network (Mask R-CNN).

  Methods  Firstly, we select the road intersection as the distinctive feature of the same name in the remote sensing image and vector data, and create a road intersection image data set to train Mask R-CNN model. Secondly, according to the geometric topological relationship, the vector data road intersections are selected as vector control points. And take the intersection control point of the vector data as the center, we use 400 × 400 pixels window to crop the remote sensing image data and input it into the Mask R-CNN model, extract the border of the road intersection in the image. The control points of the same name are determined according to the Euclidean distance between the remote sensing image and the vector data control points, and the control points of the same name are cleaned using the density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise algorithm. Finally, the affine transformation parameters are calculated according to the filtered control points of the same name to realize the registration of remote sensing image and vector data. The registration data of Shanghai vector data and Gaofen-2 image data were selected for registration experiment.

  Results  Experimental results show that the average deviations of the experimental data before were 15.34 m and 1.44 m, before and after registration based on Mask R-CNN.This method can correctly register remote sensing images and vector data, and the proposed method has better application prospects in urban data registration, and has the characteristics of strong robustness and high accuracy.

  Conclusions  The proposed method in this paper can automatically register remote sensing images and vector data from different sources in areas such as mountains, grasslands, and deserts. In the next step, the amount of sample data of remote sensing images will be increased, including types of remote sensing images and types of features.