Remote sensing road extraction by road segmentation network

Abstract

Road extraction from remote sensing images has attracted much attention in geospatial applications. However, the existing methods do not accurately identify the connectivity of the road. The identification of the road pixels may be interfered with by the abundant ground such as buildings, trees, and shadows. The objective of this paper is to enhance context and strip features of the road by designing UNet-like architecture. The overall method first enhances the context characteristics in the segmentation step and then maintains the stripe characteristics in a refinement step. The segmentation step exploits an attention mechanism to enhance the context information between the adjacent layers. To obtain the strip features of the road, the refinement step introduces the strip pooling in a refinement network to restore the long distance dependent information of the road. Extensive comparative experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms other methods, achieving an overall accuracy of 98.25% on the DeepGlobe dataset, and 97.68% on the Massachusetts dataset.