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Research Article

CoupleUNet: Swin Transformer coupling CNNs makes strong contextual encoders for VHR image road extraction

ORCID Icon, ORCID Icon, ORCID Icon & ORCID Icon
Pages 5788-5813 | Received 08 Jun 2023, Accepted 22 Aug 2023, Published online: 20 Sep 2023
 

ABSTRACT

Accurately segmenting roads is challenging due to substantial intra-class variations, indistinct inter-class distinctions, and occlusions caused by shadows, trees, and buildings. To address these challenges, it is crucial to simultaneously pay attention to important texture details and perceive global geometric context information. Recent research has shown that CNN-Transformer hybrid structures outperform using CNN or Transformer alone. CNN excels at extracting local detail features and Transformer naturally has the ability to perceive global context information. In this paper, we propose a dual-branch network module called ConSwin, which combines the advantages of ResNet and Swin Transformer for better road information extraction. Taking ConSwin as the basic encoding module, we build an hourglass-shaped network with an encoder-decoder structure. In order to better transfer texture and structural detail information between the encoder and decoder, we also design two novel connection blocks. We conduct comparative experiments on the Massachusetts and CHN6-CUG datasets, and the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of overall accuracy, IOU, and F1 metrics. Other experiments verify the effectiveness of our method, while visualization results demonstrate its ability to obtain better road representations.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) for financing this research and express our sincere gratitude to all those who have contributed to this research project.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 62101021.

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