Occlusion-Aware Topology Refinement for Robust Road Graph Extraction from Satellite Imagery

Accurate road graph extraction from satellite imagery is essential for large-scale mapping and geospatial analysis. Recent one-shot graph extraction frameworks based on foundation models have achieved promising performance, but their effectiveness decreases in complex environments where road structures are partially obscured by vegetation, buildings, shadows, and other surface conditions. These occlusion-induced disturbances lead to incomplete connectivity and degraded topology reconstruction, particularly under out-of-domain scenarios. This study proposes an occlusion-aware refinement framework to improve the robustness of satellite image road graph extraction while maintaining the original backbone architecture. The proposed framework introduces three complementary strategies: Synthetic Occlusion Augmentation for explicit occlusion-aware representation learning, an Occlusion-Adaptive Extended-Line strategy with Hard-Mining Topology Optimization for improved connectivity reasoning, and an Occlusion-Adaptive Node-Guided Resampling mechanism for reliable graph node localization. Experiments conducted on the Global-Scale road graph extraction benchmark demonstrate that the proposed method consistently improves topology reconstruction performance. Compared with the reproduced SAM-Road++ baseline, the proposed framework improves TOPO F1 from 61.81 to 62.56 on the in-domain split and from 46.93 to 51.51 on the out-of-domain split. Furthermore, the ID-OOD performance gap is reduced from 14.88 to 11.05, indicating enhanced robustness under unseen geographic conditions. The results demonstrate that explicitly modeling occlusion as a structured factor can effectively improve the generalization capability of satellite road graph extraction systems.

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Publication Details

Journal
Remote Sensing
Published
2026-09-15
DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/rs18183173
Primary Topic
Automated Road and Building Extraction
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
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article

Occlusion-Aware Topology Refinement for Robust Road Graph Extraction from Satellite Imagery

Haisu Zhang, Lingxin Xu, Qingyun Zuo, Xiaomeng Cui et al.
Remote Sensing
Automated Road and Building Extraction
article

Occlusion-Aware Topology Refinement for Robust Road Graph Extraction from Satellite Imagery

Haisu Zhang, Lingxin Xu, Qingyun Zuo, Xiaomeng Cui, Jinzhi Zhang, Long Wang
article en

Abstract

Accurate road graph extraction from satellite imagery is essential for large-scale mapping and geospatial analysis. Recent one-shot graph extraction frameworks based on foundation models have achieved promising performance, but their effectiveness decreases in complex environments where road structures are partially obscured by vegetation, buildings, shadows, and other surface conditions. These occlusion-induced disturbances lead to incomplete connectivity and degraded topology reconstruction, particularly under out-of-domain scenarios. This study proposes an occlusion-aware refinement framework to improve the robustness of satellite image road graph extraction while maintaining the original backbone architecture. The proposed framework introduces three complementary strategies: Synthetic Occlusion Augmentation for explicit occlusion-aware representation learning, an Occlusion-Adaptive Extended-Line strategy with Hard-Mining Topology Optimization for improved connectivity reasoning, and an Occlusion-Adaptive Node-Guided Resampling mechanism for reliable graph node localization. Experiments conducted on the Global-Scale road graph extraction benchmark demonstrate that the proposed method consistently improves topology reconstruction performance. Compared with the reproduced SAM-Road++ baseline, the proposed framework improves TOPO F1 from 61.81 to 62.56 on the in-domain split and from 46.93 to 51.51 on the out-of-domain split. Furthermore, the ID-OOD performance gap is reduced from 14.88 to 11.05, indicating enhanced robustness under unseen geographic conditions. The results demonstrate that explicitly modeling occlusion as a structured factor can effectively improve the generalization capability of satellite road graph extraction systems.

Remote SensingVol. 18(18)
National Defense University (US), National University of Defense Technology (CN), Wuhan University (CN), Hubei University (CN)
Sustainable cities and communities
Openalex Percentile: Top 14%
Automated Road and Building Extraction
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