DBRANet: Road Extraction by Dual-Branch Encoder and Regional Attention Decoder

Although widely exploited in recent decades, road extraction is still a very significant and challenging research in the field of remote sensing image processing due to the complex background and road distribution. Among the existing CNN-based methods, U-shape architectures composed of encoders and decoders have shown their effectiveness. In this letter, we propose an improved encoder-decoder method, named DBRANet, for extracting roads from remote sensing images. In the encoding phase, we present a dual-branch network module (DBNM) to construct more effective features, thus improving the fusion feature maps of different scales. One branch utilizes the residual block, and the other branch utilizes the refined asymmetric block, which effectively increases the feature extraction capability of the backbone. In the decoding phase, considering the sinuous shape and the unbalanced distribution of roads in remote sensing images, we design a novel attention module, named the regional attention network module (RANM), to automatically learn the importance of each channel according to the regional information. Extensive experiments on several public remote sensing road data sets show that our DBRANet achieves higher segmentation [ F1 score and Intersection over Union (IoU)] and connectivity [average path length similarity (APLS)] accuracy, which verifies the effectiveness of our approach.