Remote Sensing (Sep 2014)

Automatic Road Centerline Extraction from Imagery Using Road GPS Data

  • Chuqing Cao,
  • Ying Sun

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/rs6099014
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 6, no. 9
pp. 9014 – 9033

Abstract

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Road centerline extraction from imagery constitutes a key element in numerous geospatial applications, which has been addressed through a variety of approaches. However, most of the existing methods are not capable of dealing with challenges such as different road shapes, complex scenes, and variable resolutions. This paper presents a novel method for road centerline extraction from imagery in a fully automatic approach that addresses the aforementioned challenges by exploiting road GPS data. The proposed method combines road color feature with road GPS data to detect road centerline seed points. After global alignment of road GPS data, a novel road centerline extraction algorithm is developed to extract each individual road centerline in local regions. Through road connection, road centerline network is generated as the final output. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method can rapidly and accurately extract road centerline from remotely sensed imagery.

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