Daily Papers

Extracting routable road networks from satellite imagery requires accurate topology recovery beyond pixel-level segmentation. Recent methods decompose the task into keypoint detection and connectivity prediction, but reliably inferring road connectivity under structural ambiguity remains challenging. Overpasses introduce non-planar crossings that can create false shortcuts, and occlusions break visual continuity, requiring long-range structural reasoning. We formulate road extraction as fully unobserved connectivity inference and construct a global but sparse Euclidean graph from detected keypoints to better leverage the long-term context. To improve link prediction, we transform this graph into its line graph and perform reasoning using a Graph Transformer. We propose an end-to-end pipeline that integrates vision-based segmentation, sparse graph construction, and structured inference. Our method explicitly models overpasses and uses topology-preserving vertex extraction to mitigate routing-critical errors. This approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on City-scale, SpaceNet, and Global-scale benchmarks in topology metrics including TOPO-F1 and APLS. In addition to quantitative gains, our method improves reconstruction of multi-level road structures crucial for real-world routing reliability. The code is available at: https://github.com/wzzzzzzy/LineGraph2Road.

The Integrated Multi-Satellite Retrievals for the Global Precipitation Measurement (IMERG) product combines precipitation estimates from passive microwave (PMW) and infrared (IR) sensors to provide quasi-global precipitation estimates at half-hourly resolution. Because IR observations are primarily sensitive to cloud-top properties, however, IR-based precipitation estimates are generally less accurate than PMW estimates and can introduce artifacts into the merged precipitation fields. We introduce GPROF-IR, a neural-network-based precipitation retrieval designed to provide precipitation estimates from single-channel geostationary IR observations for the upcoming IMERG V08. GPROF-IR uses a convolutional neural network to exploit spatiotemporal information from sequences of half-hourly IR observations. We validate GPROF-IR against independent surface-based precipitation measurements over land and ocean. GPROF-IR substantially improves upon existing single-channel IR retrievals, including the IR retrieval used in IMERG V07 and more recent neural-network-based approaches. During overpasses of flagship PMW sensors, GPROF-IR is more accurate than the corresponding IMERG PMW estimates over CONUS and Austria, but not Korea. Over CONUS, GPROF-IR outperforms the merged IMERG V07 product for hourly and daily precipitation accumulations. Against shipborne disdrometer observations, GPROF-IR is more accurate than IMERG V07 in the tropics but slightly less accurate in the extratropics. Since geostationary IR observations are continuously available across much of the globe since 1983, GPROF-IR provides a promising basis for improving merged precipitation products and developing long-term, temporally consistent precipitation records.

Accurate, up-to-date High-Definition (HD) maps are critical for urban planning, infrastructure monitoring, and autonomous navigation. However, these maps quickly become outdated as environments evolve, creating a need for robust methods that not only detect changes but also incorporate them into updated 3D representations. While change detection techniques have advanced significantly, there remains a clear gap between detecting changes and actually updating 3D maps, particularly when relying on 2D image-based change detection. To address this gap, we introduce SceneEdited, the first city-scale dataset explicitly designed to support research on HD map maintenance through 3D point cloud updating. SceneEdited contains over 800 up-to-date scenes covering 73 km of driving and approximate 3 km^2 of urban area, with more than 23,000 synthesized object changes created both manually and automatically across 2000+ out-of-date versions, simulating realistic urban modifications such as missing roadside infrastructure, buildings, overpasses, and utility poles. Each scene includes calibrated RGB images, LiDAR scans, and detailed change masks for training and evaluation. We also provide baseline methods using a foundational image-based structure-from-motion pipeline for updating outdated scenes, as well as a comprehensive toolkit supporting scalability, trackability, and portability for future dataset expansion and unification of out-of-date object annotations. Both the dataset and the toolkit are publicly available at https://github.com/ChadLin9596/ScenePoint-ETK, establising a standardized benchmark for 3D map updating research.