Forest Road Extraction from High-Resolution Remote Sensing Imagery Based on an Improved U-Net Model

Abstract

To address the challenges of vegetation interference, background confusion, and road fragmentation caused by the narrow and elongated structures of forest roads in complex remote sensing imagery, this study proposed an improved U-Net-based model, namely HAA-UNet, for automatic forest road extraction. The proposed model integrates a VGG16 encoder, an Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (ASPP) module, and a Hybrid Dilated Convolution (HDCC) module to enhance feature representation and spatial detail reconstruction of road targets under complex forest environments. Experimental results demonstrated that HAA-UNet achieved superior segmentation performance on the forest road dataset of Xichang City, Sichuan Province, with Precision, Recall, F1-score, and mIoU values of 87.24%, 87.83%, 87.53%, and 79.85%, respectively, outperforming all comparison models. These results indicate that the proposed method effectively improves road continuity and boundary delineation in complex forest scenes. Furthermore, the extracted road information was integrated into the Forest Fire Risk Index (FFRI) assessment framework, demonstrating that accurate road data can improve the spatial characterization of fire risk and provide reliable data support for forest fire risk assessment and forest resource management.