EarthMapper: Visual Autoregressive Models for Controllable Bidirectional Satellite-Map Translation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Dong, Zhe, Sun, Yuzhe, Liu, Tianzhu, Zuo, Wangmeng, Gu, Yanfeng
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Dong, Zhe
Sun, Yuzhe
Liu, Tianzhu
Zuo, Wangmeng
Gu, Yanfeng
author_facet Dong, Zhe
Sun, Yuzhe
Liu, Tianzhu
Zuo, Wangmeng
Gu, Yanfeng
contents Satellite imagery and maps, as two fundamental data modalities in remote sensing, offer direct observations of the Earth's surface and human-interpretable geographic abstractions, respectively. The task of bidirectional translation between satellite images and maps (BSMT) holds significant potential for applications in urban planning and disaster response. However, this task presents two major challenges: first, the absence of precise pixel-wise alignment between the two modalities substantially complicates the translation process; second, it requires achieving both high-level abstraction of geographic features and high-quality visual synthesis, which further elevates the technical complexity. To address these limitations, we introduce EarthMapper, a novel autoregressive framework for controllable bidirectional satellite-map translation. EarthMapper employs geographic coordinate embeddings to anchor generation, ensuring region-specific adaptability, and leverages multi-scale feature alignment within a geo-conditioned joint scale autoregression (GJSA) process to unify bidirectional translation in a single training cycle. A semantic infusion (SI) mechanism is introduced to enhance feature-level consistency, while a key point adaptive guidance (KPAG) mechanism is proposed to dynamically balance diversity and precision during inference. We further contribute CNSatMap, a large-scale dataset comprising 302,132 precisely aligned satellite-map pairs across 38 Chinese cities, enabling robust benchmarking. Extensive experiments on CNSatMap and the New York dataset demonstrate EarthMapper's superior performance, achieving significant improvements in visual realism, semantic consistency, and structural fidelity over state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, EarthMapper excels in zero-shot tasks like in-painting, out-painting and coordinate-conditional generation, underscoring its versatility.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_19432
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle EarthMapper: Visual Autoregressive Models for Controllable Bidirectional Satellite-Map Translation
Dong, Zhe
Sun, Yuzhe
Liu, Tianzhu
Zuo, Wangmeng
Gu, Yanfeng
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Satellite imagery and maps, as two fundamental data modalities in remote sensing, offer direct observations of the Earth's surface and human-interpretable geographic abstractions, respectively. The task of bidirectional translation between satellite images and maps (BSMT) holds significant potential for applications in urban planning and disaster response. However, this task presents two major challenges: first, the absence of precise pixel-wise alignment between the two modalities substantially complicates the translation process; second, it requires achieving both high-level abstraction of geographic features and high-quality visual synthesis, which further elevates the technical complexity. To address these limitations, we introduce EarthMapper, a novel autoregressive framework for controllable bidirectional satellite-map translation. EarthMapper employs geographic coordinate embeddings to anchor generation, ensuring region-specific adaptability, and leverages multi-scale feature alignment within a geo-conditioned joint scale autoregression (GJSA) process to unify bidirectional translation in a single training cycle. A semantic infusion (SI) mechanism is introduced to enhance feature-level consistency, while a key point adaptive guidance (KPAG) mechanism is proposed to dynamically balance diversity and precision during inference. We further contribute CNSatMap, a large-scale dataset comprising 302,132 precisely aligned satellite-map pairs across 38 Chinese cities, enabling robust benchmarking. Extensive experiments on CNSatMap and the New York dataset demonstrate EarthMapper's superior performance, achieving significant improvements in visual realism, semantic consistency, and structural fidelity over state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, EarthMapper excels in zero-shot tasks like in-painting, out-painting and coordinate-conditional generation, underscoring its versatility.
title EarthMapper: Visual Autoregressive Models for Controllable Bidirectional Satellite-Map Translation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.19432