# Road Extraction from Overhead Images with Graph Neural Networks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.05215 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05215/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Dec 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [Neural Message Passing for Quantum Chemistry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.01212/) (2017)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (2018)
- [Modeling Relational Data with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06103/) (2017)
- [FCOS: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01355/) (2019)
- [Variational Graph Auto-Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07308/) (2016)
- [Deeper Insights into Graph Convolutional Networks for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07606/) (2018)
- [Embedding Entities and Relations for Learning and Inference in Knowledge Bases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6575/) (2014)
- [Link Prediction Based on Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.09691/) (2018)
- [DeepGCNs: Can GCNs Go as Deep as CNNs?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03751/) (2019)
- [Neural Relational Inference for Interacting Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.04687/) (2018)
- [Road Extraction by Deep Residual U-Net](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10684/) (2017)
- [DeepGlobe 2018: A Challenge to Parse the Earth through Satellite Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.06561/) (2018)
- [DeeperGCN: All You Need to Train Deeper GCNs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07739/) (2020)
- [Towards the Systematic Reporting of the Energy and Carbon Footprints of Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05651/) (2020)
- [Stochastic Beams and Where to Find Them: The Gumbel-Top-k Trick for Sampling Sequences Without Replacement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.06059/) (2019)
- [SpaceNet: A Remote Sensing Dataset and Challenge Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.01232/) (2018)
- [Carbontracker: Tracking and Predicting the Carbon Footprint of Training Deep Learning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.03051/) (2020)
- [RoadTracer: Automatic Extraction of Road Networks from Aerial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03680/) (2018)
- [XNOR-Net++: Improved Binary Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13863/) (2019)
- [Differentiable Graph Module (DGM) for Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.04999/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Towards Satellite Image Road Graph Extraction: A Global-Scale Dataset and A Novel Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16733/) (2024)
- [PaRK-Detect: Towards Efficient Multi-Task Satellite Imagery Road Extraction via Patch-Wise Keypoints Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13263/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Automatic road graph extraction from aerial and satellite images is a long-standing challenge. Existing algorithms are either based on pixel-level segmentation followed by vectorization, or on iterative graph construction using next move prediction. Both of these strategies suffer from severe drawbacks, in particular high computing resources and incomplete outputs. By contrast, we propose a method that directly infers the final road graph in a single pass. The key idea consists in combining a Fully Convolutional Network in charge of locating points of interest such as intersections, dead ends and turns, and a Graph Neural Network which predicts links between these points. Such a strategy is more efficient than iterative methods and allows us to streamline the training process by removing the need for generation of starting locations while keeping the training end-to-end. We evaluate our method against existing works on the popular RoadTracer dataset and achieve competitive results. We also benchmark the speed of our method and show that it outperforms existing approaches. This opens the possibility of in-flight processing on embedded devices.