Road Extraction From Remote Sensing Images in Wildland–Urban Interface Areas

In this letter, we address the problem of road extraction in Wildland–urban interface (WUI) areas. In recent years, with the great success of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in various vision-related tasks, researchers have developed many CNN-based methods for road extraction on remote sensing images. Nevertheless, these methods mostly treat road extraction as a binary classification problem on semantic labeling. In WUI areas, the road is narrower and tends to be occluded by trees, which may result in the serious discontinuous problem of inferred road maps. To address this issue, we propose transforming the input representation of the binary classification map into a continuous signed distance map. In this way, our model is forced to predict the continuous distance representations and, thus, improve the spatial continuities of inferred roads. In addition, a real-value regression task is designed to train along with the original binary classification task to generate spatially continuous and semantically accurate road maps. Then, we conduct experiments on the public Massachusetts road data set and a homemade data set collected from Yajishan Mountain, Beijing, China. Finally, our proposed method achieves intersection-over-unions (IoUs) of 64.11% and 65.92% for the Massachusetts and WUI-Yajishan data sets, respectively, without any postprocessing. In addition, the ablation analysis shows that introducing the regression task on the proposed signed distance representation can effectively alleviate the problem of discontinuous road prediction. Furthermore, comparing with the state-of-the-art methods demonstrates the superiority of our method for road extraction in WUI areas.