Integrated technique of segmentation and classification methods with connected components analysis for road extraction from orthophoto images

Abstract Road networks are one of the main urban features. Therefore, road parts extraction from high-resolution remotely sensed imagery and updated road database are beneficial for many GIS applications. However, owing to the presence of various types of obstacles in the images, such as shadows, cars, and trees, with similar transparency and spectral values as road class, achieving accurate road extraction using different classification and segmentation methods is still difficult. This paper proposes an integrated method combining segmentation and classification methods with connected components analysis to extract road class from orthophoto images. The proposed technique is threefold. First, multiresolution segmentation method was applied to segment images. Then, the main classification methods, namely, decision trees (DT), k-nearest neighbors (KNN), and support vector machines (SVM), were implemented based on spectral, geometric, and textural information to classify the obtained results into two classes: road and non-road. Three main accuracy evaluation measures, such as recall, precision, and F1-score, were evaluated to determine the performance of the proposed method, with respective average values of 87.62%, 89.71%, and 88.61%, respectively, for DT; 86.61%, 88.17%, and 87.30%, respectively, for KNN; and 89.83%, 89.52%, and 89.67%, respectively, for SVM. Finally, connected components labelling was used to extract road component parts, and morphological operation was employed to delete non-road parts and noises and improve the performance. These results were also compared with other prior works, which confirmed that the integrated method is an effective road extraction technique.