Beyond Endpoints: Path-Centric Reasoning for Vectorized Off-Road Network Extraction

Abstract: Deep learning has advanced vectorized road extraction in urban settings, yet off-road environments remain underexplored and challenging. A significant domain gap causes advanced models to fail in wild terrains due to two key issues: lack of large-scale vectorized datasets and structural weakness in prevailing methods. Models such as SAM-Road employ a node-centric paradigm that reasons at sparse endpoints, making them fragile to occlusions and ambiguous junctions in off-road scenes, leading to topological errors.This work addresses these limitations in two complementary ways. First, we release WildRoad, a gloabal off-road road network dataset constructed efficiently with a dedicated interactive annotation tool tailored for road-network labeling. Second, we introduce MaGRoad (Mask-aware Geodesic Road network extractor), a path-centric framework that aggregates multi-scale visual evidence along candidate paths to infer connectivity robustly.Extensive experiments show that MaGRoad achieves state-of-the-art performance on our challenging WildRoad benchmark while generalizing well to urban datasets. A streamlined pipeline also yields roughly 2.5x faster inference, improving practical applicability. Together, the dataset and path-centric paradigm provide a stronger foundation for mapping roads in the wild.