# Self-Supervised Pretraining for Aerial Road Extraction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.24326 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.24326/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [Context Encoders: Feature Learning by Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.07379/) (2016)
- [Resolution-robust Large Mask Inpainting with Fourier Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07161/) (2021)
- [ConvNeXt V2: Co-designing and Scaling ConvNets with Masked Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00808/) (2023)
- [DeepGlobe 2018: A Challenge to Parse the Earth through Satellite Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.06561/) (2018)
- [ResUNet-a: a deep learning framework for semantic segmentation of remotely sensed data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00592/) (2019)
- [SpaceNet: A Remote Sensing Dataset and Challenge Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.01232/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation using Generative Adversarial Networks for Semantic Segmentation of Aerial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03198/) (2019)
- [Learning Aerial Image Segmentation from Online Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06879/) (2017)
- [TorontoCity: Seeing the World with a Million Eyes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00423/) (2016)
- [SkyScapes -- Fine-Grained Semantic Understanding of Aerial Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.06102/) (2020)
- [Stagewise Unsupervised Domain Adaptation with Adversarial Self-Training for Road Segmentation of Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.12611/) (2021)
- [SPIN Road Mapper: Extracting Roads from Aerial Images via Spatial and Interaction Space Graph Reasoning for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07701/) (2021)
- [AeroRIT: A New Scene for Hyperspectral Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08178/) (2019)
- [One Stack to Rule them All: To Drive Automated Vehicles, and Reach for the 4th level](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02645/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Deep neural networks for aerial image segmentation require large amounts of labeled data, but high-quality aerial datasets with precise annotations are scarce and costly to produce. To address this limitation, we propose a self-supervised pretraining method that improves segmentation performance while reducing reliance on labeled data. Our approach uses inpainting-based pretraining, where the model learns to reconstruct missing regions in aerial images, capturing their inherent structure before being fine-tuned for road extraction. This method improves generalization, enhances robustness to domain shifts, and is invariant to model architecture and dataset choice. Experiments show that our pretraining significantly boosts segmentation accuracy, especially in low-data regimes, making it a scalable solution for aerial image analysis.