From road centrelines to carriageways—A reconstruction algorithm

Stelios Vitalis; Anna Labetski; Hugo Ledoux; Jantien Stoter

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0262801

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionMay 31, 2021
12 Oct 2021 Decision Letter - Itzhak Benenson, Editor PONE-D-21-17971From road centrelines to carriageways - a reconstruction algorithmPLOS ONE Dear Dr. Vitalis, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. Please pay attention to the following critical points:1. You focus on the local match between the reconstructed and real carriageways.- What is the overall match between the reconstructed and real networks for the city neighborhood or region?- How you can compare the reconstructed and real patterns formally? - Are all matches/mismatches equally important?2. Is your study the first of this kind? If yes - claim that. If not - compare your algorithms to the existing ones3. Your algorithms are heuristic. How can you know that they are sufficient for resolving all OSM problems? Note that this remark is tightly related to the question about quality of your reconstruction at the regional level Please submit your revised manuscript by Nov 26 2021 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file. Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript: A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'. A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. 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List out the main contributions of the current work. 3. Compare the results of the current work with the recent state-of-the-art. 4. Discuss the drawbacks of the current work in the conclusion. 5. Performance Comparison of proposed system with state-of-art literature is not provided any where in the article. 6. The disadvantages of the existing schemes must be discussed in tabular form. 7. The last paragraph of the Introduction must represent the structure of the paper in a more inspiring way. ****** 6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy. Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: Yes:** Dr. Kadiyala Ramana [NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.] While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0262801.r001
Revision 1
24 Dec 2021 Author Response Thank you for your comments. Please, find our response to your suggestions below: # Editor's comments 1. You focus on the local match between the reconstructed and real carriageways. - What is the overall match between the reconstructed and real networks for the city neighborhood or region? We are not ensuring a matching with the real-world carriageways, but instead we are confident enough that the carriageways we produce are a good approximation of the network. This is based on the fact that we trust the original datasets, both OSM as a reliable crowdsourced dataset of the roads network and the areal representations as they are of official institutional sources (i.e. local governments). Ensuring a high accuracy match between the reconstructed and real networks is out of the scope of this research. Instead, we are focusing on how to extract an approximation as representative enough as it can be based on the original data. The motivation of this research is to be able to automatically create a carriageways' network from easily accessible and actively maintained data. We amended our introduction to state that our work is about creating an approximation of carriageways to clarify this. - How you can compare the reconstructed and real patterns formally? We don't believe such a comparison can be achieved unless official sources of carriageway networks are provided. In this context and given the scope of our research, we evaluated our output's quality visually using satellite imagery and used our personal knowledge of some areas (Toronto and The Hague) to ensure that the output is, indeed, a good approximation. - Are all matches/mismatches equally important? The importance of mismatches between the reconstructed and real carriageways is heavily relying on the specific application for which the network is intended for. We set as the most important requirement for our work that the connectivity of the network is preserved. In order to ensure that our work is generic enough both application-wise and geographically we made most decisions prudently. As a result, we expect that some complex areas of the network, mostly flyovers or irregular and high-degree intersections, remain of lower detail in order to ensure that the connectivity persists. We highlight a few of these cases in our paper and we comment on the challenges that arise from them. We amended the manuscript to better reflect that, by making it explicit in the introduction and the conclusions that our methodology is about creating an approximation of carriageways. We, also, added a paragraph in the conclusions to clarify the features of our method that we prioritised the most. 2. Is your study the first of this kind? If yes - claim that. If not - compare your algorithms to the existing ones While we review other research about creating carriageways and lanes from satellite imagery, to our knowledge there is no other work that relies on open vector data to do so. Therefore, we believe that our current phrasing of a "novel reconstruction algorithm" in the introduction and conclusions fairly represents the uniqueness of this work. Nevertheless, we remain open to any other phrasing suggestions. 3. Your algorithms are heuristic. How can you know that they are sufficient for resolving all OSM problems? Note that this remark is tightly related to the question about quality of your reconstruction at the regional level Resolving any potential issues from OSM is out of the scope of this research. We developed our algorithm to be applicable in a wide variety of areas and, therefore, our focus was on ensuring that the output network is valid with respect to the input data provided. Our methodology can be easily adopted to work with other data sources. Nevertheless, we do trust OSM as a reliable source of data for our use case. We added a paragraph at the end of our conclusions to clarify the generic nature of our methodology and that it can be easily adopted to work with other centerline datasets. # Reviewer 1 comments 1. What is the novelty in the current work? Discuss how the present work adds value to the exiting works. While we review other research about creating carriageways and lanes from satellite imagery, to our knowledge there is no other work that relies on open vector data to do so. 2. List out the main contributions of the current work. Our methodology works automatically. It, also, works with easily accessible and open vector data and is geographically and application neutral. We appended the conclusions to state these more explicitly. 3. Some of the recent work on intelligent transportation systems such as the following can be discussed in the paper: "CANintelliIDS: detecting in-vehicle intrusion attacks on a controller area network using CNN and attention-based GRU, Deep learning-based traffic safety solution for a mixture of autonomous and manual vehicles in a 5G-enabled intelligent transportation system". This paper has nothing to do with our research, and we feel strongly that we do not need to include it in our paper. 4. Compare the results obtained with recent state of the art. Based on our answer to question no 1, due to the vastly different nature of our research compared to other works and their use of proprietary data, we believe that it is impossible to provide a formal comparison between our work and any other studies related to carriageways reconstruction. 5. What is the computational complexity of the proposed approach? We introduced a computational complexity analysis section in the paper to address this issue. # Reviewer 2 comments 1. What are the limitations of the existing works that motivated the current work? Current works use satellite imagery which is hard to find and expensive to acquire. In addition, there is no work about creating carriageways from vector data automatically. 2. List out the main contributions of the current work. Our methodology works automatically. It, also, works with easily accessible and open vector data and is geographically and application neutral. We appended the conclusions to state these more explicitly. 3. Compare the results of the current work with the recent state-of-the-art. Based on our answer to question no 1, due to the vastly different nature of our research compared to other works and their use of proprietary data, we believe that it is impossible to provide a formal comparison between our work and any other studies related to carriageways reconstruction. 4. Discuss the drawbacks of the current work in the conclusion. We already discuss the drawbacks extensively in the discussion and future work, therefore we see no benefit of repeating them in the conclusions. 5. Performance Comparison of proposed system with state-of-art literature is not provided any where in the article. We introduced a computational complexity analysis section in the paper to address this issue. 6. The disadvantages of the existing schemes must be discussed in tabular form. We believe that our methodology is so vastly different to other works related to carriageways reconstruction, that such a table would not benefit the structure of the paper. 7. The last paragraph of the Introduction must represent the structure of the paper in a more inspiring way. We find it hard to identify what an "inspiring way" means in this context. Unless some examples or clarification is provided regarding this point, we are satisfied with the existing phrasing of our structure of the paper. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: ResponseToReviewers.pdf https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0262801.r002
6 Jan 2022 Decision Letter - Itzhak Benenson, Editor From road centrelines to carriageways - a reconstruction algorithm PONE-D-21-17971R1 Dear Dr. Vitalis, We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements. Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication. An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org. Kind regards, Itzhak Benenson, Ph.D. Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation. Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed ******** 2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #2: (No Response) ****** 3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #2: (No Response) ****** 4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #2: (No Response) ****** 5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #2: (No Response) ****** 6. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #2: (No Response) ****** 7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy. Reviewer #2: Yes:** Dr. Kadiyala Ramana https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0262801.r003
Formally Accepted
10 Feb 2022 Acceptance Letter - Itzhak Benenson, Editor PONE-D-21-17971R1 From road centrelines to carriageways - a reconstruction algorithm Dear Dr. Vitalis: I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now with our production department. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please let them know about your upcoming paper now to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information please contact onepress@plos.org. If we can help with anything else, please email us at plosone@plos.org. Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and supporting open access. Kind regards, PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff on behalf of Professor Itzhak Benenson Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0262801.r004

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