METHOD, APPARATUS, AND COMPUTER PROGRAM PRODUCT FOR LANE GEOMETRY GENERATION BASED ON GRAPH ESTIMATION

A method is provided for automatically creating road and lane geometry from images representing probe data within a geographical area using graph estimation. Methods may include: receiving a rasterized image representative of map geometry within a geographic area, where each pixel of the rasterized image includes a property representing at least one feature of the map geometry; identifying pixels within the rasterized image corresponding to nodes of one or more map elements as node pixels; determining, for a respective node pixel, presence of a next node based on the at least one property of the respective node pixel; determining for the respective node pixel, a location corresponding to the next node based on the at least one property of the respective node pixel; generating, from a sequence of node pixels, at least one map element; and updating a map in a map database with the at least one map element.