Swin-GAT Fusion Dual-Stream Hybrid Network for High-Resolution Remote Sensing Road Extraction

This paper introduces a novel dual-stream collaborative architecture for remote sensing road segmentation, designed to overcome multi-scale feature conflicts, limited dynamic adaptability, and compromised topological integrity. Our network employs a parallel “local–global” encoding scheme: the local stream uses depth-wise separable convolutions to capture fine-grained details, while the global stream integrates a Swin-Transformer with a graph-attention module (Swin-GAT) to model long-range contextual and topological relationships. By decoupling detailed feature extraction from global context modeling, the proposed framework more faithfully represents complex road structures. Comprehensive experiments on multiple aerial datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms conventional baselines—especially under shadow occlusion and for thin-road delineation—while achieving real-time inference at 31 FPS. Ablation studies further confirm the critical roles of the Swin Transformer and GAT components in preserving topological continuity. Overall, this dual-stream dynamic-fusion network sets a new benchmark for remote sensing road extraction and holds promise for real-world, real-time applications.