Road topology refinement via a multi-conditional generative adversarial network

Abstract

With the rapid development of intelligent transportation, there comes huge demands for high-precision road network maps. However, due to the complex road spectral performance, it is very challenging to extract road networks with complete topologies. Based on the topological networks produced by previous road extraction methods, in this paper, we propose a Multi-conditional Generative Adversarial Network (McGAN) to obtain complete road networks by refining the imperfect road topology. The proposed McGAN, which is composed of two discriminators and a generator, takes both original remote sensing image and the initial road network produced by existing road extraction methods as input. The first discriminator employs the original spectral information to instruct the reconstruction, and the other discriminator aims to refine the road network topology. Such a structure makes the generator capable of receiving both spectral and topological information of the road region, thus producing more complete road networks compared with the initial road network. Three different datasets were used to compare McGan with several recent approaches, which showed that the proposed method significantly improved the precision and recall of the road networks, and also worked well for those road regions where previous methods could hardly obtain complete structures.