Road networks play a significant role in modern city management. It is necessary to continually extract current road structure, as it changes rapidly with the development of the city. Due to the success of semantic segmentation based on deep learning in the application of computer vision, extracting road networks from VHR (Very High Resolution) imagery becomes a method of updating geographic databases. The major shortcoming of deep learning methods for road networks extraction is that they need a massive amount of high quality pixel-wise training datasets, which is hard to obtain. Meanwhile, a large amount of different types of VGI (volunteer geographic information) data including road centerline has been accumulated in the past few decades. However, most road centerlines in VGI data lack precise width information and, therefore, cannot be directly applied to conventional supervised deep learning models. In this paper, we propose a novel weakly supervised method to extract road networks from VHR images using only the OSM (OpenStreetMap) road centerline as training data instead of high quality pixel-wise road width label. Large amounts of paired Google Earth images and OSM data are used to validate the approach. The results show that the proposed method can extract road networks from the VHR images both accurately and effectively without using pixel-wise road training data. scribble annotation for road extraction. The ground truth of the pixel-level annotation in Figure 1b should label every pixel, which is difficult to generate. Figure 1c represents the scribble annotation, which can be easily obtained from OSM. Because the full annotation dataset is expensive to obtain and the scribble annotation is easy to generate, the study of road networks extraction using scribble labels is of great importance.Recently, weakly supervised learning was popular in image segmentation [13][14][15][16]. In these methods, scribbles [17,18], bounding boxes [19,20], clicks [19], and image-level tags [18] are used as supervision for image segmentation. In this work, the OSM centerline is used as a typical scribbles supervision for road extraction.In order to improve annotation efficiency and road extraction performance for automated VHR (Very High Resolution, spatial resolution 0∼2 m/pixel) images interpretation, this paper proposes a weakly supervised method to extract the road network supervised only by the scribble annotation OSM centerline. In this method, graph cut theory and a deep learning technique named Multi-Dilated-ResUNet (MD-ResUNet) are used to make efficient roads extraction.The main contributions of this paper are as follows:1. A novel deep learning approach based on revised ResUNet with hybrid loss is proposed for road extraction, which can only be supervised by weakly labeled OSM centerline instead of carefully notated pixel-wise road width information. 2. In order to improve the performance of the proposed model furtherly, a novel multi-dilation network with learnable parameters is added to conventional ResUnet. Th...