Mountain roads are of great significance to traffic navigation and military road planning. Extracting mountain roads based on high-resolution remote sensing images (HRSIs) is a hot spot in current road extraction research. However, massive terrain objects, blurred road edges, and sand coverage in complex environments make it challenging to extract mountain roads from HRSIs. Complex environments result in weak research results on targeted extraction models and a lack of corresponding datasets. To solve the above problems, first, we propose a new dataset: Road Datasets in Complex Mountain Environments (RDCME). RDCME comes from the QuickBird satellite, which is at an elevation between 1264 m and 1502 m with a resolution of 0.61 m; it contains 775 image samples, including red, green, and blue channels. Then, we propose the Light Roadformer model, which uses a transformer module and self-attention module to focus on extracting more accurate road edge information. A post-process module is further used to remove incorrectly predicted road segments. Compared with previous related models, the Light Roadformer proposed in this study has higher accuracy. Light Roadformer achieved the highest IoU of 89.5% for roads on the validation set and 88.8% for roads on the test set. The test on RDCME using Light Roadformer shows that the results of this study have broad application prospects in the extraction of mountain roads with similar backgrounds.

The technology of road extraction serves as a crucial foundation for urban intelligent renewal and green sustainable development. Its outcomes can optimize transportation network planning, reduce resource waste, and enhance urban resilience. Deep learning-based approaches have demonstrated outstanding performance in road extraction, particularly excelling in complex scenarios. However, extracting roads from remote sensing data remains challenging due to several factors that limit accuracy: (1) Roads often share similar visual features with the background, such as rooftops and parking lots, leading to ambiguous inter-class distinctions; (2) Roads in complex environments, such as those occluded by shadows or trees, are difficult to detect. To address these issues, this paper proposes an improved model based on Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs), named FR-SGCN (Hierarchical Depth-wise Separable Graph Convolutional Network Incorporating Graph Reasoning and Attention Mechanisms). The model is designed to enhance the precision and robustness of road extraction through intelligent techniques, thereby supporting precise planning of green infrastructure. First, high-dimensional features are extracted using ResNeXt, whose grouped convolution structure balances parameter efficiency and feature representation capability, significantly enhancing the expressiveness of the data. These high-dimensional features are then segmented, and enhanced channel and spatial features are obtained via attention mechanisms, effectively mitigating background interference and intra-class ambiguity. Subsequently, a hybrid adjacency matrix construction method is proposed, based on gradient operators and graph reasoning. This method integrates similarity and gradient information and employs graph convolution to capture the global contextual relationships among features. To validate the effectiveness of FR-SGCN, we conducted comparative experiments using 12 different methods on both a self-built dataset and a public dataset. The proposed model achieved the highest F1 score on both datasets. Visualization results from the experiments demonstrate that the model effectively extracts occluded roads and reduces the risk of redundant construction caused by data errors during urban renewal. This provides reliable technical support for smart cities and sustainable development.