3dSAGER: Geospatial Entity Resolution over 3D Objects (Technical Report)

TL;DR

This paper introduces 3dSAGER, a novel end-to-end pipeline for geospatial entity resolution over 3D objects that leverages intrinsic geometric features and a new blocking method to improve accuracy and efficiency across datasets with incompatible coordinate systems.

Contribution

The paper presents 3dSAGER, a new approach that uses geometry-based features and a lightweight blocking method for robust geospatial entity resolution in 3D urban data.

Findings

Significant accuracy improvements over baseline methods.

Enhanced efficiency in candidate generation.

Robust performance across datasets with different coordinate systems.

Abstract

Urban environments are continuously mapped and modeled by various data collection platforms, including satellites, unmanned aerial vehicles and street cameras. The growing availability of 3D geospatial data from multiple modalities has introduced new opportunities and challenges for integrating spatial knowledge at scale, particularly in high-impact domains such as urban planning and rapid disaster management. Geospatial entity resolution is the task of identifying matching spatial objects across different datasets, often collected independently under varying conditions. Existing approaches typically rely on spatial proximity, textual metadata, or external identifiers to determine correspondence. While useful, these signals are often unavailable, unreliable, or misaligned, especially in cross-source scenarios. To address these limitations, we shift the focus to the intrinsic geometry of 3D spatial objects and present 3dSAGER (3D Spatial-Aware Geospatial Entity Resolution), an end-to-end pipeline for geospatial entity resolution over 3D objects. 3dSAGER introduces a novel, spatial-reference-independent featurization mechanism that captures intricate geometric characteristics of matching pairs, enabling robust comparison even across datasets with incompatible coordinate systems where traditional spatial methods fail. As a key component of 3dSAGER, we also propose a new lightweight and interpretable blocking method, BKAFI, that leverages a trained model to efficiently generate high-recall candidate sets. We validate 3dSAGER through extensive experiments on real-world urban datasets, demonstrating significant gains in both accuracy and efficiency over strong baselines. Our empirical study further dissects the contributions of each component, providing insights into their impact and the overall design choices.