Extracting road centrelines from high-resolution satellite images using active window line segment matching and improved SSDA

Abstract

This paper presents a new semi-automatic approach to extracting main road centrelines from high-resolution satellite images. The approach is based on active window line segment matching and an improved sequential similarity detection algorithm (SSDA). First, a user-specified point on the road centreline is selected as a reference central point to define a template window, and a thresholding operation is performed within the window. Then a best matched target window along the road is searched to determine the next central point in the road. To avoid the influence of noise, only the line segment of ‘interest’ in the window is matched. An improved SSDA searching strategy is proposed to increase the matching speed. When the best matched target window is found, its centre is used as the next central point in the road, and a new template window is generated. By repeating the matching process, a series of central points can be obtained automatically and the corresponding final road centreline from them is extracted. Our approach also allows some kinds of user interventions in case automatic tracking fails. Experimental results confirm that the proposed approach is capable of rapidly and accurately extracting main road centrelines and has good robustness against noise.