CoANet: Connectivity Attention Network for Road Extraction From Satellite Imagery

Extracting roads from satellite imagery is a promising approach to update the dynamic changes of road networks efficiently and timely. However, it is challenging due to the occlusions caused by other objects and the complex traffic environment, the pixel-based methods often generate fragmented roads and fail to predict topological correctness. In this paper, motivated by the road shapes and connections in the graph network, we propose a connectivity attention network (CoANet) to jointly learn the segmentation and pair-wise dependencies. Since the strip convolution is more aligned with the shape of roads, which are long-span, narrow, and distributed continuously. We develop a strip convolution module (SCM) that leverages four strip convolutions to capture long-range context information from different directions and avoid interference from irrelevant regions. Besides, considering the occlusions in road regions caused by buildings and trees, a connectivity attention module (CoA) is proposed to explore the relationship between neighboring pixels. The CoA module incorporates the graphical information and enables the connectivity of roads are better preserved. Extensive experiments on the popular benchmarks (SpaceNet and DeepGlobe datasets) demonstrate that our proposed CoANet establishes new state-of-the-art results. The source code will be made publicly available at: https://mmcheng.net/coanet/.