An improved algorithm for automatic road detection in high-resolution remote sensing images by means of geometric features and path opening

In this paper, we propose an improved road detection method from high-resolution remote sensing images by means of a modified path opening and closing algorithm. To detect high curvature roads, we improved previously used adjacency graphs by enlarging the path angle of modified adjacency graphs. Furthermore, to remove noise efficiently, we combined the length of paths with road geometrical features to set up road extraction decision rules. A chief advantage of our approach is to be able to extract roads consisting of an unknown number of segments without manual parameter adjustment. We evaluated our proposed method systematically with a variety of images from IKONOS, EROS and aerial images. Experimental results demonstrated the accuracy and efficiency of our proposed method.