Recognizing road from satellite images by structured neural network.

•We have collected a large labeled road extraction dataset with varying region distribution, which includes labels for both roads and their orientations.•We further designed a structured deep neural network for road extraction. The specially designed cascade network and direction module are quite effective to capture the linear structure of the road. The experimental results reveal the effectiveness of our structured road extraction network.•We designed a novel road performance evaluation metric that considers both the pixel-level aspect and number-level aspect. To our best knowledge, it is the first time to introduce the number-level metric for the road detection task.