Sloan, Sean, Talkhani, Raiyan R., Huang, Tao, Engert, Jayden, and Laurance, William F. (2024) Mapping Remote Roads Using Artificial Intelligence and Satellite Imagery. Remote Sensing, 16 (5). 839.

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Abstract

Road building has long been under-mapped globally, arguably more than any other human activity threatening environmental integrity. Millions of kilometers of unmapped roads have challenged environmental governance and conservation in remote frontiers. Prior attempts to map roads at large scales have proven inefficient, incomplete, and unamenable to continuous road monitoring. Recent developments in automated road detection using artificial intelligence have been promising but have neglected the relatively irregular, sparse, rustic roadways characteristic of remote semi-natural areas. In response, we tested the accuracy of automated approaches to large-scale road mapping across remote rural and semi-forested areas of equatorial Asia-Pacific. Three machine learning models based on convolutional neural networks (UNet and two ResNet variants) were trained on road data derived from visual interpretations of freely available high-resolution satellite imagery. The models mapped roads with appreciable accuracies, with F1 scores of 72–81% and intersection over union scores of 43–58%. These results, as well as the purposeful simplicity and availability of our input data, support the possibility of concerted program of exhaustive, automated road mapping and monitoring across large, remote, tropical areas threatened by human encroachment.

Item ID:	86025
Item Type:	Article (Research - C1)
ISSN:	2072-4292
Copyright Information:	© 2024 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Funders:	James Cook University (JCU)
Date Deposited:	02 Jul 2025 01:56
FoR Codes:	31 BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES > 3103 Ecology > 310308 Terrestrial ecology @ 70% 40 ENGINEERING > 4013 Geomatic engineering > 401304 Photogrammetry and remote sensing @ 30%
SEO Codes:	18 ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT > 1806 Terrestrial systems and management > 180603 Evaluation, allocation, and impacts of land use @ 100%
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