<title>Semi-automatic road extraction from IKONOS satellite image</title>

Abstract

A semi-automatic road extraction method from high-resolution (1-m) satellite images is presented. As IKONOS, a high-resolution (1-m) satellite has been launched and several companies have plans to launch high-resolution satellites, extraction of man-made objects from high-resolution satellite images has been main concern of many scientists. The method consists of three phases; 1) NUBS (Non Uniform B-Spline) curve is formed by given seed points. 2) A road candidate area is made by straightening image along the NUBS curve. 3) Finally, road is extracted by a tracking algorithm which uses adaptive least squares correlation match method and linearity. Due to straightening image, the tracking algorithm extracts roads accurately even though there are road gaps, and the size of a matrix for least squares correlation match can be reduced. We test our method on high-resolution (1-m) satellite (IKONOS) image. The test result reveals our method is robust and can be one of the feasible solutions of mapping from high-resolution (1-m) satellite images.