A new approach for road extraction using data augmentation and semantic segmentation

Accurate road extraction from remote sensing images is a challenging task. Several methods of extraction have been developed but the precision of extraction is still limited for the unpaved and small-width roads. This paper proposes an accurate road extraction approach called DAA-SSEG since it uses data augmentation architecture (DAA) and semantic segmentation model (SSEG). The proposed approach DAA-SSEG is based on a modified full convolutional neural network that overcomes the vanishing gradient and the training saturation issues. It recognizes roads at the pixel level. Furthermore, The DAA-SSEG approach uses a new plan of data augmentation based on geometric transformation and images refinement techniques. It allows getting a richer dataset thus better training and an accurate extraction. The experiment denotes that the proposed approach DAA-SSEG, that combine data augmentation architecture and semantic segmentation method, outperforms some state-of-the-art methods in terms of F-measures. The results demonstrate that it ensures accurate extraction of unpaved and small-width roads, in urban and rural areas. Moreover, the proposed approach distinguishes between roads and trails and can extract some roads not labeled beforehand