Road-MobileSeg: Lightweight and Accurate Road Extraction Model from Remote Sensing Images for Mobile Devices

Current road extraction models from remote sensing images based on deep learning are computationally demanding and memory-intensive because of their high model complexity, making them impractical for mobile devices. This study aimed to develop a lightweight and accurate road extraction model, called Road-MobileSeg, to address the problem of automatically extracting roads from remote sensing images on mobile devices. The Road-MobileFormer was designed as the backbone structure of Road-MobileSeg. In the Road-MobileFormer, the Coordinate Attention Module was incorporated to encode both channel relationships and long-range dependencies with precise position information for the purpose of enhancing the accuracy of road extraction. Additionally, the Micro Token Pyramid Module was introduced to decrease the number of parameters and computations required by the model, rendering it more lightweight. Moreover, three model structures, namely Road-MobileSeg-Tiny, Road-MobileSeg-Small, and Road-MobileSeg-Base, which share a common foundational structure but differ in the quantity of parameters and computations, were developed. These models varied in complexity and were available for use on mobile devices with different memory capacities and computing power. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed models outperform the compared typical models in terms of accuracy, lightweight structure, and latency and achieve high accuracy and low latency on mobile devices. This indicates that the models that integrate with the Coordinate Attention Module and the Micro Token Pyramid Module surpass the limitations of current research and are suitable for road extraction from remote sensing images on mobile devices.