Road Extraction from Remote Sensing Images Using a Skip-Connected Parallel CNN-Transformer Encoder-Decoder Model

Extracting roads from remote sensing images holds significant practical value across fields like urban planning, traffic management, and disaster monitoring. Current Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) methods, praised for their robust local feature learning enabled by inductive biases, deliver impressive results. However, they face challenges in capturing global context and accurately extracting the linear features of roads due to their localized receptive fields. To address these shortcomings of traditional methods, this paper proposes a novel parallel encoder architecture that integrates a CNN Encoder Module (CEM) with a Transformer Encoder Module (TEM). The integration combines the CEM’s strength in local feature extraction with the TEM’s ability to incorporate global context, achieving complementary advantages and overcoming limitations of both Transformers and CNNs. Furthermore, the architecture also includes a Linear Convolution Module (LCM), which uses linear convolutions tailored to the shape and distribution of roads. By capturing image features in four specific directions, the LCM significantly improves the model’s ability to detect and represent global and linear road features. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method achieves substantial improvements on the German-Street Dataset and the Massachusetts Roads Dataset, increasing the Intersection over Union (IoU) of road class by at least 3% and the overall F1 score by at least 2%.