Road extraction in remote sensing data: A survey

Abstract

• This review covers a wider perspective in terms of both 2D remote sensing images and 3D point clouds. • This review provides a detail survey on 2D and 3D remote sensing datasets used for road extraction. • This review presents a detail analysis of challenges and future trends of road extraction from remote sensing data. Automated extraction of roads from remotely sensed data come forth various usages ranging from digital twins for smart cities, intelligent transportation, urban planning, autonomous driving, to emergency management. Many studies have focused on promoting the progress of methods for automated road extraction from aerial and satellite optical images, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images, and LiDAR point clouds. In the past 10 years, no a more comprehensive survey on this topic could be found in literature. This paper attempts to provide a comprehensive survey on road extraction methods that use 2D earth observing images and 3D LiDAR point clouds. In this review, we first present a tree-structure that separate the literature into 2D and 3D. Then, further methodologies level classification is demonstrated both in 2D and 3D. In 2D and 3D, we introduce and analyze the literature published in the last ten years. Except for the methodologies, we also review the aspects of data commonly used. Finally, this paper explores the existing challenges and future trends.