The embodiment of the invention discloses a method and equipment for extracting road characteristics. The method can comprise the steps that: an original SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) image is preprocessed through nonlinear quantization and an image filtering method based on an MAR (Multi-scale Auto Regressive) model, and an image after the SAR image preprocessing is obtained; the preprocessed image is subjected to road characteristic extraction by a road extraction algorithm based on the ratio and the direction fusion, and the road characteristics of the original SAR image are obtained; and thus the road characteristics in the SAR image can be efficiently and accurately extracted.