CE-RoadNet: A Cascaded Efficient Road Network for Road Extraction from High-Resolution Satellite Images

The reconstruction of road networks from high-resolution satellite images is of significant importance across a range of disciplines, including traffic management, vehicle navigation and urban planning. However, existing models are computationally demanding and memory-intensive due to their high model complexity, rendering them impractical in many real-world applications. In this work, we present Cascaded Efficient Road Network (CE-RoadNet), a novel neural network architecture which emphasizes the elegance and simplicity of its design, while also retaining a noteworthy level of performance in road extraction tasks. First, a simple encoder–decoder architecture (Effi-RoadNet) is proposed, which leverages smoothed dilated convolutions combined with an attention-guided feature fusion module to aggregate features from multiple levels. Subsequently, an extended variant termed CE-RoadNet is designed in a cascaded architecture to enhance the feature representation ability of the model. Benefiting from the concise network design and the prominent representational ability of the stacking mechanism, our network can accomplish better trade-offs between accuracy and efficiency. Extensive experiments on public road datasets demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art results with lower complexity. All codes and models will be released soon to facilitate reproduction of our results.