Aerial laser scanning and imagery data fusion for road detection in city scale

This paper presents a workflow including a novel algorithm for road detection from dense LiDAR fused with high-resolution aerial imagery data. Using a supervised machine learning approach point clouds are firstly classified into one of three groups: building, ground, or unassigned. Ground points are further processed by a novel algorithm to extract a road network. The algorithm exploits the high variance of slope and height of the point data in the direction orthogonal to the road boundaries. Applying the proposed approach on a 40 million point dataset successfully extracted a complex road network with an F-measure of 76.9%.