Road Extraction From Very High Resolution Remote Sensing Optical Images Based on Texture Analysis and Beamlet Transform

Road extraction from very high resolution sensors is a very popular topic in panchromatic and multispectral remote sensing image analysis. Despite the vast number of methods proposed in the literature to deal with this problem, in practice, most are quite limited and do not account for geometric and radiometric variability. Our aim is to propose a novel road extraction approach able to efficiently extract roads and reduce computation time using texture analysis and multiscale reasoning based on the beamlet transform. The proposed methodology consists of two stages: 1) road edge candidate selection and 2) multiscale reasoning with the beamlet transform. In the first step, mathematical morphology is applied to distinguish rectilinear structures, and road edge candidates are identified using the Canny edge detector. In the second phase, multiscale reasoning using the beamlet transform allows local and global information to be combined. Global information is introduced to distinguish main road axes at coarser scales, and local segments in finer scales, which are aggregated to reconstruct the road network. Rules based on the spatial relationships between segments belonging to different levels of resolution are also introduced at this stage. The experiments are performed based on the images acquired from the city of Port-au-Prince in Haiti during the earthquake of January 2010. The results demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of our algorithm.