A multiscale road matching method based on hierarchical road meshes

Road networks in the maps generally need to keep their up-to-date status to satisfy the requirements of various applications. Road matching is the essential step to achieve this objective. In previous studies, matching road networks was performed by checking the similarity of road junctions and arc segments, which is mainly applied to the road networks at the same scale and rarely takes into account the hierarchical structure of the road networks. Therefore, this paper proposes a matching method based on hierarchical road mesh to match multiscale road networks. Firstly, a hierarchical road mesh is established according to the road attribute levels. Then, the common road mesh is extracted, and its corresponding association skeleton tree is created. Finally, the matching is performed from high-level roads to low-level roads using the association skeleton tree as a constraint and road semantic similarity as an evaluation indicator. The experiments were conducted on the road networks at two different scales, and the presented method was compared with the other two conventional matching methods. The results show that the proposed method outperforms the two traditional methods in terms of matching accuracy and rate.