Automatic extraction of road segments from high resolution satellite images

Abstract

The problem of road segment extraction from high resolution satellite or aerial images has been considered in this paper. Efficient extraction of road segments is a difficult task due to the problems regarding image acquisition, local road width and orientation etc. A novel method of road region extraction using local spectral and geometrical properties has been proposed here. The image is first segmented using mean-shift based approach. Edge preserving smoothing is performed beforehand to preserve the sharpness of the object boundaries. Then a rejection stage using chord distribution technique is considered to remove dominant non-road regions. It is followed by a cost optimization step based on a region following grid graph to efficiently extract the road segments. A further orientation based region linking is performed to overcome problems due to occlusion. Experiments on several high resolution satellite images have established the capability of the proposed method.