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<front>
<journal-meta>
<journal-id journal-id-type="publisher">AGILE-GISS</journal-id>
<journal-title-group>
<journal-title>AGILE: GIScience Series</journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="publisher">AGILE-GISS</abbrev-journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="nlm-ta">AGILE GIScience Ser.</abbrev-journal-title>
</journal-title-group>
<issn pub-type="epub">2700-8150</issn>
<publisher><publisher-name>Copernicus Publications</publisher-name>
<publisher-loc>Göttingen, Germany</publisher-loc>
</publisher>
</journal-meta>
<article-meta>
<article-id pub-id-type="doi">10.5194/agile-giss-7-32-2026</article-id>
<title-group>
<article-title>Object-Level Detection of Hand-Drawn Annotations in Participatory Sketch Maps Using Paired Clean and Annotated Basemaps</article-title>
</title-group>
<contrib-group><contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Langer</surname>
<given-names>Clemens</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Thomé</surname>
<given-names>Celina</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Fulman</surname>
<given-names>Nir</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Knoblauch</surname>
<given-names>Steffen</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff3">
<sup>3</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Zipf</surname>
<given-names>Alexander</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff3">
<sup>3</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Grinblat</surname>
<given-names>Yulia</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
</contrib-group><aff id="aff1">
<label>1</label>
<addr-line>Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology (HeiGIT) gGmbH, Heidelberg, Germany</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff2">
<label>2</label>
<addr-line>Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff3">
<label>3</label>
<addr-line>Interdisciplinary Center for Scientific Computing (IWR/ICSC), Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany</addr-line>
</aff>
<pub-date pub-type="epub">
<day>10</day>
<month>06</month>
<year>2026</year>
</pub-date>
<volume>7</volume>
<elocation-id>32</elocation-id>
<permissions>
<copyright-statement>Copyright: &#x000a9; 2026 Clemens Langer et al.</copyright-statement>
<copyright-year>2026</copyright-year>
<license license-type="open-access">
<license-p>This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit <ext-link ext-link-type="uri"  xlink:href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/</ext-link></license-p>
</license>
</permissions>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://agile-giss.copernicus.org/articles/7/32/2026/agile-giss-7-32-2026.html">This article is available from https://agile-giss.copernicus.org/articles/7/32/2026/agile-giss-7-32-2026.html</self-uri>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://agile-giss.copernicus.org/articles/7/32/2026/agile-giss-7-32-2026.pdf">The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://agile-giss.copernicus.org/articles/7/32/2026/agile-giss-7-32-2026.pdf</self-uri>
<abstract>
<p>Automatic extraction of hand-drawn annotations from participatory sketch maps is essential for digitising community-generated spatial information but remains challenging due to heterogeneous drawing styles, scanning artefacts, and complex basemap content. Existing approaches typically treat markup extraction as pixel-level segmentation or simple image differencing, which struggles under real-world variability. To address this, we formulate annotation extraction as an object-level task using a YOLO-based detector applied to RGB images of annotated maps. In addition, change detection is performed using paired RGB images of annotated and clean maps to isolate user-drawn content from the underlying basemap. Experiments on &amp;sim;2,300 real sketch maps and &amp;sim;18,000 synthetic samples show strong performance across diverse conditions. Object detection on annotated maps alone achieves mAP@50 of 91.5% on satellite imagery and 97.3% on OSM basemaps, while incorporating paired clean maps for change detection improves performance to 97.4% and 98.1%, respectively. Synthetic pretraining further enhances results on real hand-drawn data, indicating that simulated annotations effectively supplement limited labelled samples.</p>
</abstract>
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