Road detection in dense urban areas using SAR imagery and the usefulness of multiple views

This paper deals with the automatic extraction of the road network in dense urban areas using a few-meters-resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. The first part presents the proposed method, which is an adaptation of previous work to the specific case of urban areas. The major modifications are 1) the clique potentials of the Markov random field that extracts the road network are adapted and 2) a multiscale framework is used. Results on shuttle mission and aerial SAR images with different resolutions are presented. The second part is dedicated to road extraction combining two SAR images taken with different flight directions (orthogonal and antiparallel passes), and the obtained improvement is analyzed.

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