Can ants build urban street networks?

Our paper deals with the detection and automatic extraction of a hierarchical network of urban streets from maps containing only building footprint data. We develop a new approach for extracting, locating and labelling plausible street networks in a given city, based on geometrical an functional considerations. Using some basic tools from the « Mathematical Morphology » field, we propose simple, robust and efficient techniques for extracting homotopic skeletons of the ground zones and a street-width map. Our method leads to the construction of open or closed connex graphs that we encode and save. Finally, we develop some ant-based techniques to identify plausible elements (streets, boulevards, avenues, lanes, water streams) in this graph.