Effective building pattern recognition, a complex task that requires the simultaneous consideration of individual building features and spatial relations, is essential for successfully generalizing maps. However, existing deep learning approaches must still be adequately comprehensive in jointly quantifying the individual features and spatial relationships of buildings, suggesting further improvement in the quantitative representation of building spaces. This study presents a novel edge-attention multi-head graph convolutional network (GCN) that concurrently considers the quantitative modeling and representation of individual features and spatial relations, enhancing building pattern recognition. The proposed method captures individual building features and spatial relations, including proximity and arrangement similarity, by using spatial relationship descriptors and attention mechanisms to generate spatial relevance coefficients. These coefficients are then integrated into a weighted multi-head GCN to participate in the quantitative expression of individual features, facilitating the quantitative analysis and modeling of building features, and thus, improving recognition performance. Our experimental analysis confirms the method’s superior capability in recognizing complex spatial features. The method also demonstrates strong generalization across different scales and areas, underscoring its efficacy and potential for enhancing geospatial analyses.

Automatic matching of multisource data is an important technique for achieving change detection, fusion and updating spatial data. However, most current learning methods for building footprint matching require a large number of samples, and labeling these samples is costly in terms of labor and time. Moreover, multisource building footprint data are complex and diverse leading to recognizing the different matching relationships is a hard task. Thus, this study proposes a learning-based method for recognizing multisource building footprints matching relationships by using a one-class support vector machine (OCSVM). The OCSVM was trained using only positive samples. First, a set of geometric indicators was designed to train a model and realize initial matching recognition. Then, a contextual metric was calculated based on the rough matching results, and geometric and contextual metrics were combined to train the model and realize relaxed matching recognition. Relaxed matching is an optimization process implemented after initial matching to recognize more relaxed matching relationships. In relaxed matching, a convex hull is used to recognize matching relationships besides 1:1, such as 1:n, m:1 and m:n. The experimental results showed that the proposed method outperformed indicator-weighted (weighted average) and learning-based matching methods, such as traditional SVMs and decision trees (DTs). The precision scores of the proposed model were 97.1%, 95% and 97.2% for the Wuhan (China), Beijing (China) and Richmond Hill (Canada) datasets, respectively. Furthermore, the proposed model identified the matching relationships of buildings with complex geometric features and high-density spatial distributions.

Urban scenes consist of visual and semantic features and exhibit spatial relationships among land-use types (e.g. industrial areas are far away from the residential zones). This study applied a graph convolutional network with neighborhood information (henceforth, named the neighbour supporting graph convolutional neural network), to learn spatial relationships for urban scene classification. Furthermore, a co-occurrence analysis with visual and semantic features proceeded to improve the accuracy of urban scene classification. We tested the proposed method with the fifth ring road of Beijing with an overall classification accuracy of 0.827 and a Kappa coefficient of 0.769. In comparison with other methods, such as support vector machine, random forest, and general graph convolutional network, the case study showed that the proposed method improved about 10% in urban scene classification.