An Enhanced Feature Extraction and Multi-Branch Occlusion Discrimination Network for Road Detection from Satellite Imagery

Extracting road network information from satellite remote sensing images is an effective method of dealing with dynamic changes in road networks. At present, the use of deep learning methods to automatically segment road networks from remote sensing images has become mainstream. However, existing methods often produce fragmented extraction results. This is usually caused by insufficient feature extraction and occlusion. In order to solve these problems, we propose an enhanced feature extraction and multi-branch occlusion discrimination network (EFMOD-Net) based on an encoder–decoder architecture. Firstly, a multi-directional feature extraction (MFE) module was proposed as the input for the network, which utilizes multi-directional strip convolution for feature extraction to better capture the linear features of the road. Subsequently, an enhanced feature extraction (EFE) module was designed to enhance the performance of the model in the feature extraction stage by using a dual-branch structure. The proposed multi-branch occlusion discrimination (MOD) module combines the attention mechanism and strip convolution to learn the topological relationship between pixels, enhance the network’s detection of occlusion and complex backgrounds, and reduce the generation of road debris. On the public dataset, the proposed method is compared with other SOTA methods. The experimental results show that the network designed in this paper achieves an IoU of 64.73 and 63.58 on the DeepGlobe and CHN6-CUG datasets, respectively, which is 1.66% and 1.84% higher than the IoU of performance-based methods. The proposed method combines multi-directional bar convolution and a multi-branch structure for road extraction, which provides a new idea for linear object segmentation in complex backgrounds that could be applied directly to urban renewal, disaster assessment, and other application scenarios.