Edge-Reinforced Convolutional Neural Network for Road Detection in Very-High-Resolution Remote Sensing Imagery

Road detection in very-high-resolution remote sensing imagery is a hot research topic. However, the high resolution results in highly complex data distributions, which lead to much noise for road detection—for example, shadows and occlusions caused by disturbance on the roadside make it difficult to accurately recognize road. In this article, a novel edge-reinforced convolutional neural network, combined with multiscale feature extraction and edge reinforcement, is proposed to alleviate this problem. First, multiscale feature extraction is used in the center part of the proposed network to extract multiscale context information. Then edge reinforcement, applying a simplified U-Net to learn additional edge information, is used to restore the road information. The two operations can be used with different convolutional neural networks. Finally, two public road data sets are adopted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach, with experimental results demonstrating its superiority.