Objectives Recognition of building group patterns is an important part of the building generalization. Efficient methods for the recognition of building group patterns can effectively improve the quality of automated map generalization. Traditional recognition methods mainly include geometric methods and traditional machine learning methods, which are limited by the complex rule definitions and huge feature engineering. The graph convolution neural network (GCN) can overcome the limitations of traditional methods to some extent and has been successfully applied to the pattern analysis of buildings. However, there are few methods to recognize multiple building group patterns using GCN, and the existing GCN methods are almost based on spectral graph convolution, which do not consider local spatial information fully.

Methods As the spatial GCN is more efficient than the spectral GCN, this paper introduces a spatial GCN method DGCNN to recognize three building group patterns, including linear pattern, grid pattern and irregular pattern. The first step is to cluster the buildings into different groups, then some indices are selected to construct the feature vector of each group according to the Gestalt principles. Second, Delaunay triangulation (DT) and minimum spanning tree (MST) are chosen to construct graph structures of building groups. Finally, graph structures are used as input for the DGCNN model, and building group patterns are obtained after training.

Results The experiment selects the urban areas in Shanghai and we compare the accuracies with traditional spectral GCN method. The results show that the accuracy for the DGCNN model in the train set can reach 97.06%, and 95% for the test set. And the accuracies for the spectral GCN model in the train set is 90.90%, and 86.05% in the test set.

Conclusions The proposed method overcomes the limitations of spectral GCN, and it does not need graph Fourier transform. It can improve the recognition accuracy significantly and faces less difficulty in explaining the process of feature extraction. Hence it is an effective method for the recognition of building group patterns.