Acta Geodaetica et Cartographica Sinica ›› 2026, Vol. 55 ›› Issue (9): 1679-1694.doi: 10.11947/j.AGCS.2026.20260175

• Cartography and Geographic Information • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Building shape encoding model integrating skeleton and contour features

Xiechun Lu1,2,3(), Peiyang Hou1, Kai Ma1,4, Zhanlong Chen2,3,5, Yongyang Xu5()   

  1. 1.College of Computer and Information Technology, China Three Gorges University, Yichang 443002, China
    2.Engineering Research Center of Natural Resource Information Management and Digital Twin Engineering Software, Ministry of Education, Wuhan 430074, China
    3.Hubei Key Laboratory of Intelligent Geo-Information Processing, China University of Geosciences, Wuhan 430074, China
    4.Three Gorges Digital Intelligence Institute, China Three Gorges University, Yichang 443002, China
    5.School of Computer Science, China University of Geoscience, Wuhan 430078, China
  • Received:2026-05-11 Revised:2026-08-31 Online:2026-10-28 Published:2026-10-28
  • Contact: Yongyang Xu E-mail:luxiechun@ctgu.edu.cn;yongyangxu@cug.edu.cn
  • About author:Lu Xiechun (1992—), male, PhD, lecturer, majors in intelligent cartography, cartographic generalization, spatio-temporal big data analysis. E-mail: luxiechun@ctgu.edu.cn
  • Supported by:
    The National Natural Science Foundation of China(42601756; 42471475; 42371454);The Natural Science Foundation of Hubei Province(2025AFB107);The Joint Open Fund of the Research Platforms of School of Computer Science, China University of Geosciences, Wuhan(PTLH2024-B-09)

Abstract:

Building shape plays an important role in the cartographic generalization of buildings, and is essential for building feature selection, simplification, shape preservation, and multi-scale representation. Existing methods mostly perform modeling based on local or regional features of buildings. Although they can characterize local geometric variations in building contours, they lack effective constraints on global structure, making it difficult to simultaneously preserve contour details and global morphological characteristics. This limitation hinders the overall representation capability regarding complex building forms. This paper proposes an unsupervised shape representation learning network, skeleton-contour shape representation network model (SCSR-Net), which integrates building skeleton and contour features. By constructing a skeleton point-set autoencoder to learn skeleton features reflecting the global structure of buildings and a graph convolutional autoencoder to learn contour features reflecting local building details, the model achieves joint learning and fusion through a joint encoding and feature aggregation mechanism, which yields shape encodings that capture both skeleton and contour characteristics of building shapes. Experimental results demonstrate that the SCSR-Net effectively integrates global and local information, overcomes the limitations of single-feature encoding, and achieves excellent performance in shape matching and retrieval tasks, thereby validating the effectiveness of the proposed model.

Key words: building shape representation, feature fusion, cartographic generalization, unsupervised learning

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