# PolyTopoBench: A Benchmark for Complex Vector Polygon Generation from Remote Sensing Imagery

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.32856 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.32856/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Sparse R-CNN: End-to-End Object Detection with Learnable Proposals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12450/) (2020)
- [Convolutional Neural Networks for Medical Image Analysis: Full Training or Fine Tuning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.00712/) (2017)
- [Boundary IoU: Improving Object-Centric Image Segmentation Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16562/) (2021)
- [SpaceNet: A Remote Sensing Dataset and Challenge Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.01232/) (2018)
- [Panoptic Segmentation of Satellite Image Time Series with Convolutional Temporal Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07933/) (2021)
- [Efficient Interactive Annotation of Segmentation Datasets with Polygon-RNN++](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09693/) (2018)
- [Deep Snake for Real-Time Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.01629/) (2020)
- [Fast Interactive Object Annotation with Curve-GCN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.06874/) (2019)
- [PolyTransform: Deep Polygon Transformer for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02801/) (2019)
- [Annotating Object Instances with a Polygon-RNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05548/) (2017)
- [Foreground-Aware Relation Network for Geospatial Object Segmentation in High Spatial Resolution Remote Sensing Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.09766/) (2020)
- [PolyWorld: Polygonal Building Extraction with Graph Neural Networks in Satellite Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15491/) (2021)
- [Fields of The World: A Machine Learning Benchmark Dataset For Global Agricultural Field Boundary Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16252/) (2024)
- [Foundation Models for Geospatial Reasoning: Assessing Capabilities of Large Language Models in Understanding Geometries and Topological Spatial Relations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17136/) (2025)
- [Machine-learned Regularization and Polygonization of Building Segmentation Masks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.12587/) (2020)
- [Towards General-Purpose Representation Learning of Polygonal Geometries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15458/) (2022)
- [GLH-Water: A Large-Scale Dataset for Global Surface Water Detection in Large-Size Very-High-Resolution Satellite Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09310/) (2023)
- [Spatial-RAG: Spatial Retrieval Augmented Generation for Real-World Geospatial Reasoning Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18470/) (2025)
- [A diverse large-scale building dataset and a novel plug-and-play domain generalization method for building extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.10004/) (2022)
- [Pix2Poly: A Sequence Prediction Method for End-to-end Polygonal Building Footprint Extraction from Remote Sensing Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07899/) (2024)
- [Spatial-Agent: Agentic Geo-spatial Reasoning with Scientific Core Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.16965/) (2026)
- [RoIPoly: Vectorized Building Outline Extraction Using Vertex and Logit Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14920/) (2024)
- [PRUE: A Practical Recipe for Field Boundary Segmentation at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.27101/) (2026)
- [Global Collinearity-aware Polygonizer for Polygonal Building Mapping in Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.01385/) (2025)
- [HoliTracer: Holistic Vectorization of Geographic Objects from Large-Size Remote Sensing Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.16251/) (2025)
- [POIReviewQA: A Semantically Enriched POI Retrieval and Question Answering Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.02802/) (2018)
- [ACPV-Net: All-Class Polygonal Vectorization for Seamless Vector Map Generation from Aerial Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16616/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Vector polygon generation converts visual inputs, e.g., remote sensing (RS) images, into vectorized polygonal geometries, supporting applications such as autonomous driving, vector map construction, and remote sensing. Early pipelines predict raster masks and post-process them into polygons, which prevents end-to-end optimization and may miss small objects or introduce inaccurate vertices. Recent methods directly generate vector polygons, but most focus on simple exterior contours, while they either cannot represent complex polygons with holes or fail to preserve their topology. In this paper, we propose PolyTopoBench, a unified evaluation framework for vector polygon generation from RS images with explicit emphasis on complex polygons. PolyTopoBench evaluates both exterior and interior rings, and benchmarks 11 representative methods, including segmentation-based polygonization pipelines, vision foundation model baselines, and specialized vector polygon generators, on two RS-image datasets covering buildings, roads, vegetation, and unvegetated regions. Experiments show that existing methods often recover simple exterior boundaries but degrade substantially on polygons with holes or multiple rings. These results reveal complex polygon generation as an unresolved challenge and motivate topology-aware benchmarks and model designs. Code and data are available at https://github.com/seai-lab/PolyTopoBench.