Road Detection from Remote Sensing Imagery

Abstract

Road network maps facilitate a great number of applications in our everyday life. However, their automatic creation is a difficult task, and so far, published methodologies cannot provide reliable solutions. The common and most recent approach is to design a road detection algorithm from remote sensing imagery based on a Convolutional Neural Network, followed by a result refinement post-processing step. In this project I proposed a deep learning model that utilized the Multi-Task Learning technique to improve the performance of the road detection task by incorporating prior knowledge constraints. Multi-Task Learning is a mechanism whose objective is to improve a model's generalization performance by exploiting information retrieved from the training signals of related tasks as an inductive bias, and, as its name suggests, solve multiple tasks simultaneously. Carefully selecting which tasks will be jointly solved favors the preservation of specific properties of the target object, in this case, the road network. My proposed model is a Multi-Task Learning U-Net with a ResNet34 encoder, pre-trained on the ImageNet dataset, that solves for the tasks of Road Detection Learning, Road Orientation Learning, and Road Intersection Learning. Combining the capabilities of the U-Net model, the ResNet encoder and the constrained Multi-Task Learning mechanism, my model achieved better performance both in terms of image segmentation and topology preservation against the baseline single-task solving model. The project was based on the publicly available SpaceNet Roads Dataset.