Road networks are very important features in geospatial databases. Even though high-resolution optical satellite images have already been acquired for more than a decade, tools for automated extraction of road networks from these images are still rare. One consequence of this is the need for manual interaction which, in turn, is time and cost intensive. In this paper, a multi-stage approach is proposed which integrates structural, spectral, textural, as well as contextual information of objects to extract road networks from very high resolution satellite images. Highlights of the approach are a novel linearity index employed for the discrimination of elongated road segments from other objects and customized tensor voting which is utilized to fill missing parts of the network. Experiments are carried out with different datasets. Comparison of the achieved results with the results of seven state-of-the-art methods demonstrated the efficiency of the proposed approach.
Nowadays automatic road extraction from satellite imageries is considered as one of the most important research trends in the field of remote sensing. This paper presents a method for automatic extraction of road centerlines from synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery. During the first step, three features, namely the direction of the least total radiance, the corresponding radiance, and the contrast are extracted to define the road characteristics by the backscatter coefficient of each pixel and its neighboring pixels from the SAR imagery. The fusion of the extracted features is carried out in the next step for detection of the road areas by using a fuzzy inference system. Afterwards, the morphology skeletonization is applied on the road areas to extract the road skeleton. Then some interested seed points are extracted so that they could be used in a snake model, which is employed to connect the seed points in order to form up the road centerlines. The proposed algorithm is tested on different parts of TerraSAR-X images. The experimental results reveal that the proposed method is effective in terms of correctness, completeness, and quality.
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