Dual convolutional network based on hypergraph and multilevel feature fusion for road extraction from high-resolution remote sensing images

ABSTRACT

Road extraction from high-resolution remote sensing images (HRSI) is confronted with the challenge that roads are occluded by other objects, including opaque obstructions and similarly colored areas. This paper proposes a dual convolutional network based on hypergraph and multilevel feature fusion (DHM) for road extraction to address these challenges. The DHM consists of two branch networks (HGNN branch and CNN branch) and a bimodal feature fusion module (BFFM). In the HGNN branch, an algorithm is developed to exploit the shape features of roads and construct hypergraphs on the HRSI. Then, hypergraph neural networks are employed for the first time to capture the long-range context of roads to enhance road connectivity. In the CNN branch, a bottleneck fusion module integrated with an encoder-decoder network structure is built to aggregate multiscale local features. In BFFM, the long-range context from the HGNN branch and the local features from the CNN branch are fused through the designed position converter and enhanced graph reasoning module to achieve the complementary advantages of the dual-branch network. Extensive experiments on three datasets show that DHM outperforms other state-of-the-art methods, especially on the GS-Mountain road dataset. Furthermore, DHM significantly improves road extraction in occluded and similar road regions.

KEYWORDS:

• Road extraction
• hypergraph construction
• hypergraph convolution networks
• convolutional neural networks
• remote sensing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Guizhou Provincial Key Technology R&D Program under Grant (QKHZC(2022)YB074) and the Guizhou Provincial Major Scientific and Technological Program under Grant (QKHZDZX(2022)001).