Road Change Detection for Map Updating Using Geometric Boundary Deviation Between Digital Maps and Aerial Segmentation Results

Abstract. Road change detection is essential for maintaining up-to-date digital maps; however, conventional update processes rely heavily on the manual interpretation of aerial imagery, leading to high labor costs and inconsistent outcomes. To address these limitations, this study proposes an automated road change detection method that integrates aerial orthophoto-based segmentation with geometric boundary deviation analysis. Road areas are first extracted from high-resolution aerial orthophotos using SegFormer, a Transformer-based semantic segmentation model. The segmentation results are then converted into vector polygons for geometric analysis. Structural changes, such as newly constructed or removed roads, are detected through a difference-based comparison with historical digital maps. Simultaneously, shape changes are quantitatively analyzed by measuring geometric deviations between road boundaries. Specifically, vertex-wise distances between corresponding boundaries are computed, and the overall deformation is evaluated using Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), incorporating Z-score-based outlier removal to ensure robustness against noise.
Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method effectively detects both structural changes and subtle geometric variations, including road expansions and boundary shifts. Furthermore, the method enables clear object-level classification of change types, providing a practical and efficient framework for digital map updating workflows.