A cross entropy based deep neural network model for road extraction from satellite images

Abstract

This paper proposes a deep convolutional neural network model with encoder-decoder architecture to extract road network from satellite images. We employ ResNet-18 and Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling technique to trade off between the extraction precision and running time. A modified cross entropy loss function is proposed to train our deep model. A PointRend algorithm is used to recover a smooth, clear and sharp road boundary. The augmentated DeepGlobe dataset is used to train our deep model and the asynchronous training method is applied to accelerate the training process. Five salellite images covering Xiaomu village are taken as input to evaluate our model. The proposed E-Road model has fewer number of parameters and shorter training time. The experiments show E-Road outperforms other state-of-the-art deep models with 5.84% to 59.09% improvement, and can give the accurate predictions for the images with complex environment.