GlobalMapper: Arbitrary-Shaped Urban Layout Generation

Modeling and designing urban building layouts is of significant interest in computer vision, computer graphics, and urban applications. A building layout consists of a set of buildings in city blocks defined by a network of roads. We observe that building layouts are discrete structures, consisting of multiple rows of buildings of various shapes, and are amenable to skeletonization for mapping arbitrary city block shapes to a canonical form. Hence, we propose a fully automatic approach to building layout generation using graph attention networks. Our method generates realistic urban layouts given arbitrary road networks, and enables conditional generation based on learned priors. Our results, including user study, demonstrate superior performance as compared to prior layout generation networks, support arbitrary city block and varying building shapes as demonstrated by generating layouts for 28 large cities.

1. Introduction

Layout generation is of significant interest today in computer vision, computer graphics, and related fields. In particular, an urban building layout consists of a set of buildings arranged into arbitrarily shaped city blocks as defined by a network of interconnected roads. Such layouts are needed in order to provide urban configurations for entertainment, simulation, and scientific applications such as designing and evolving cities to address urban weather forecasting (Fig. 5), urban heat island modeling, and sky view factor analysis, etc.