A Generic FCN-Based Approach for the Road-Network Extraction From VHR Remote Sensing Images – Using OpenStreetMap as Benchmarks

As one road network is often the backbone in a geo-spatial dataset, capturing and/or updating the road networks using remote sensing imagery play an important role in traffic management, urban planning, vehicle navigation, and emergency management. Along with the progress of remote sensing launching technologies and the successful applications of deep learning in the field of computer vision, it has become more and more efficient and economical to employ deep learning methods for road-features extractions from very high-resolution (VHR) remote sensing imagery. Meanwhile, as one of the most significant and popular volunteer geographic information data sources, the OpenStreetMap (OSM) including the complete road networks in the wide world has been accumulated in the past decades. In this article, a generic and automatic approach for extracting road networks from VHR remote sensing images has been proposed based on fully convolutional neural network, in which the road centerlines from OSM have been employed to construct the labels for the model training and validation. In the conducted experiments on various VHR image datasets with two different spatial resolutions of 0.3 and 1 m, the proposed model has demonstrated quite satisfactory results – the overall completeness and correctness of the roads extraction from VHR remote sensing images exceed 94.0% and 98.0%, respectively.