Synthesizing location semantics from street view images to improve urban land-use classification.

Land-use maps are instrumental to inform urban planning and environmental research. Street view images (SVIs) have shown great potential for automated land-use classification for land-use mapping. However, previous studies overlooked SVI-derived location contextual information that may help improve land-use classification. This study proposes a novel land-use classification method that synthesizes location semantics from SVIs to account for contextual information from SVIs, land parcels and roads around the SVIs. The proposed method first generates land-use scene images (LUSIs) by using an SVI-derived straightforward algorithm. The LUSIs are then relocated to land parcels by using a displacement strategy and classified into land-use types by using a deep learning network. This study determines the land-use types of land parcels with classified LUSIs. Two case studies, consisting of LUSIs for five land-use types, show that introducing location semantics of SVIs can remarkably improve the classification accuracy of land-use types. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]