LineGraph2Road: Structural Graph Reasoning on Line Graphs for Road Network Extraction

Zhengyang Wei
Jenny Suckale
Yiyi He
Renzhi Jing
2026

Abstract

Extracting routable road networks from satellite imagery requires accurate topology recovery beyond pixel-level segmentation. Recent methods decompose the task into keypoint detection and connectivity prediction, but reliably inferring road connectivity under structural ambiguity remains challenging. Overpasses introduce non-planar cross-ings that can create false shortcuts, and occlusions break visual continuity, requiring long-range structural reasoning. We formulate road extraction as fully unobserved connectivity inference and construct a global but sparse Euclidean graph from detected keypoints to better leverage the long-term context. To improve link prediction, we transform this graph into its line graph and perform reasoning using a Graph Transformer. We propose an end-to-end pipeline that integrates vision-based segmentation, sparse graph construction, and structured inference. Our method explicitly models overpasses and uses topology-preserving vertex extraction to mitigate routing-critical errors. This approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on City-scale, SpaceNet, and Global-scale bench marks in topology metrics including TOPO-F1 and APLS. In addition to quantitative gains, our method improves reconstruction of multi-level road structures crucial for real-world routing reliability. We will make our code publicly available.
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