Objective Deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) is widely used in automatic road extraction from high-resolution remote sensing images (HRSIs). However, the existing methods make it difficult to model the context relationship of pixels in the predicted results. To solve this problem, some studies have used fully connected conditional random field (FullCRF) to perform secondary optimization of semantic segmentation results combined with context information, but the discontinuity problem of road structure cannot be effectively improved.

Methods In order to improve the integrity of road structure, this paper proposes a short range conditional random filed (SRCRF) model combined with DCNN. SRCRF mainly includes a unary potential function based on road pre-segmentation, a binary potential function based on spectral spatial features, and a K-neighborhood mean field inference algorithm. First, the prior knowledge of road pre-segmentation results is obtained by using the powerful feature extraction capability of DCNN as the unary potential function of SRCRF. Then, the dependence of the binary potential function defined by the linear combination of Gaussian kernel functions on the surrounding nodes is modeled. The binary potential function enables the classification results to have local consistency,that is, adjacent pixels with similar spectral features have the same label. Finally, the K-neighborhood mean field inference algorithm based on the mean-field approximation inference algorithm optimizes the inference range to make full use of the spatial context information and spectral feature context information of the road, and then calculates the optimal label corresponding to each pixel based on the space and spectral feature to optimize the road accurately. The convolution method is adopted to control the inference range of SRCRF within the radius of K in order to improve the proportion of feature vectors.

Results The experimental results show that SRCRF not only alleviates the transition smoothness of FullCRF,but also alleviates the structural discontinuity and incompleteness in the road acquisition results of HRSIs. In Zimbawe-Roads dataset and Cheng-Roads dataset,F1-scores of SRCRF are increased by about 4.01% and 3.73% respectively compared with DCNN, and about 3.25% and 2.28% respectively compared with FullCRF.

Conclusions The proposed SRCRF combines the advantages of DCNN,optimizes the fully connected structure of traditional conditional random fields into the K-neighborhood structure,reduces the inference scope,and improves the proportion of feature vectors. Compared with FullCRF, SRCRF can make better use of image color features and spatial features to accurately optimize the road extraction results of deep learning output. The performance of SRCRF is improved compared with DCNN and FullCRF, and the time is shortened by one order of magnitude compared with FullCRF. In the future, we will further investigate the potential for learning Gaussian features and investigate more complex architecture of conditional random field to better capture global context information. Additionally, we are particularly interested in exploring the application potential of SRCRF in other fields, such as building extraction, vehicle extraction, lake extraction, etc.