Road Network Extraction in VHR SAR Images of Urban and Suburban Areas by Means of Class-Aided Feature-Level Fusion

Abstract

In this paper, we propose to combine two road extractors from very high resolution synthetic aperture radar scenes: one more successful in rural areas and one explicitly designed for urban areas. In order to get the best combination of both, a rapid mapping filter for discriminating rural and urban scenes is utilized. Finally, the results are fused on a feature level and connected by means of a network optimization. The approach is tested and evaluated on TerraSAR-X data containing complex urban areas and urban-rural fringe scenes.