Road Extraction from High Resolution Satellite Images

Roads are significant objects of an infrastructure and the extraction of roads from aerial and satellite images are important for different applications such as automated map generation and change detection. Roads are also important to detect other structures such as buildings and urban areas. In this paper, the road extraction approach is based on Active Contour Models for 1-meter resolution gray level images. Active Contour Models contains Snake Approach. During applications, the road structure was separated as salient-roads, non-salient roads and crossings and extraction of these is provided by using Ribbon Snake and Ziplock Snake methods. These methods are derived from traditional snake model. Finally, various experimental results were presented. Ribbon and Ziplock Snake methods were compared for both salient and non-salient roads. Also these methods were used to extract roads in an image. While Ribbon snake is described for extraction of salient roads in an image, Ziplock snake is applied for extraction of non-salient roads. Beside these, some constant variables in literature were redefined and expressed in a formula as depending on snake approach and a new approach for extraction of crossroads were described and tried.