Road Segmentation in SAR Satellite Images with Deep Fully-Convolutional Neural Networks

Remote sensing is extensively used in cartography. As transportation networks grow and change, extracting roads automatically from satellite images is crucial to keep maps up-to-date. Synthetic Aperture Radar satellites can provide high resolution topographical maps. However roads are difficult to identify in these data as they look visually similar to targets such as rivers and railways. Most road extraction methods on Synthetic Aperture Radar images still rely on a prior segmentation performed by classical computer vision algorithms. Few works study the potential of deep learning techniques, despite their successful applications to optical imagery. This letter presents an evaluation of Fully-Convolutional Neural Networks for road segmentation in SAR images. We study the relative performance of early and state-of-the-art networks after carefully enhancing their sensitivity towards thin objects by adding spatial tolerance rules. Our models shows promising results, successfully extracting most of the roads in our test dataset. This shows that, although Fully-Convolutional Neural Networks natively lack efficiency for road segmentation, they are capable of good results if properly tuned. As the segmentation quality does not scale well with the increasing depth of the networks, the design of specialized architectures for roads extraction should yield better performances.Comment: 5 pages, accepted for publication in IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letter

Review on Active and Passive Remote Sensing Techniques for Road Extraction

Digital maps of road networks are a vital part of digital cities and intelligent transportation. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review on road extraction based on various remote sensing data sources, including high-resolution images, hyperspectral images, synthetic aperture radar images, and light detection and ranging. This review is divided into three parts. Part 1 provides an overview of the existing data acquisition techniques for road extraction, including data acquisition methods, typical sensors, application status, and prospects. Part 2 underlines the main road extraction methods based on four data sources. In this section, road extraction methods based on different data sources are described and analysed in detail. Part 3 presents the combined application of multisource data for road extraction. Evidently, different data acquisition techniques have unique advantages, and the combination of multiple sources can improve the accuracy of road extraction. The main aim of this review is to provide a comprehensive reference for research on existing road extraction technologies.Peer reviewe

Bayesian Fusion of Multi-Scale Detectors for Road Extraction from SAR Images

This paper introduces an innovative road network extraction algorithm using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery for improving the accuracy of road extraction. The state-of-the-art approaches, such as fraction extraction and road network optimization, failed to obtain continuous road segments in separate successions, since the optimization could not change the parts ignored by the fraction extraction. In this paper, the proposed algorithm integrates the fraction extraction and optimization procedure simultaneously to extract the road network: (1) the Bayesian framework is utilized to transfer the road network extraction to joint reasoning of the likelihood of fraction extraction and the priority of network optimization; (2) the multi-scale linear feature detector (MLFD) and the network optimization beamlet are introduced; (3) the conditional random field (CRF) is used to reason jointly. The result is the global optimum since the fraction extraction and network optimization are exploited at the same time. The proposed algorithm solves the problem that the fractions are bound to reduce in the process of network optimization and has demonstrated effectiveness in real SAR images applications

Bayesian Fusion of Multi-Scale Detectors for Road Extraction from SAR Images

This paper introduces an innovative road network extraction algorithm using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery for improving the accuracy of road extraction. The state-of-the-art approaches, such as fraction extraction and road network optimization, failed to obtain continuous road segments in separate successions, since the optimization could not change the parts ignored by the fraction extraction. In this paper, the proposed algorithm integrates the fraction extraction and optimization procedure simultaneously to extract the road network: (1) the Bayesian framework is utilized to transfer the road network extraction to joint reasoning of the likelihood of fraction extraction and the priority of network optimization; (2) the multi-scale linear feature detector (MLFD) and the network optimization beamlet are introduced; (3) the conditional random field (CRF) is used to reason jointly. The result is the global optimum since the fraction extraction and network optimization are exploited at the same time. The proposed algorithm solves the problem that the fractions are bound to reduce in the process of network optimization and has demonstrated effectiveness in real SAR images applications