Road network extraction from satellite images is widely applicated in
intelligent traffic management and autonomous driving fields. The
high-resolution remote sensing images contain complex road areas and distracted
background, which make it a challenge for road extraction. In this study, we
present a stacked multitask network for end-to-end segmenting roads while
preserving connectivity correctness. In the network, a global-aware module is
introduced to enhance pixel-level road feature representation and eliminate
background distraction from overhead images; a road-direction-related
connectivity task is added to ensure that the network preserves the graph-level
relationships of the road segments. We also develop a stacked multihead
structure to jointly learn and effectively utilize the mutual information
between connectivity learning and segmentation learning. We evaluate the
performance of the proposed network on three public remote sensing datasets.
The experimental results demonstrate that the network outperforms the
state-of-the-art methods in terms of road segmentation accuracy and
connectivity maintenance.

本研究提出了一个堆叠多任务网络，在保持连通性正确性的同时，端到端地分割道路。在网络中，引入了全局感知模块来增强像素级道路特征表示并消除空中图像的干扰背景；增加了与道路方向相关的连通性任务，以确保网络保持道路片段的图级关系。我们还开发了一种堆叠多头结构，以共同学习和有效利用连通性学习和分割学习之间的相互信息。我们在三个公共遥感数据集上评估了所提出网络的性能。实验结果表明，该网络在道路分割准确性和连通性维护方面优于现有方法。