A Novel Region-Based Approach for Automatic Road Extraction from High Resolution Satellite Images

Abstract

With the constantly increasing public availability of high resolution satellite imagery, interest in automatic road extraction from this imagery has recently increased. Road extraction from high resolution satellite imagery refers to reliable road surface extraction instead of road line extraction because roads in the imagery mostly correspond to an elongated region with a locally constant spectral signature rather than traditional thin lines. This paper proposes a novel automatic road extraction approach that is based on a combination of image segmentation and one-class classification and consists of two main steps. First, the image is segmented using a modified previous segmentation algorithm to achieve more reliable segmentation for road extraction. The key road objects are then automatically extracted from the segmented image to obtain road training samples. Then one-class classification, based on a support vector data description classifier, is carried out to extract the road surface area from the image. The experimental results from a pan-sharpened KOMPSAT-2 satellite image demonstrate the correctness and efficiency of the proposed method for its application to road extraction from high resolution satellite image.