Energy-based Method for Road Extraction from Satellite Images

In this paper, we present a new method for automatic road tracking and extraction from satellite images. Our method is a kind of global and parallel method. It includes the following three parts: I ) an edge detector is applied and the satellite image is transfered into binary edge map (EM). 2) we propose a special kind of energy function with marginal effect to represent each edge chain in the EM. Through this energy function, we are able to track and extract the candidates of roads. 3) By applying the generic knowledge of roads, we can easily discard the false candidates, and then produce the road boundaries from the remaining chains. The experiments show that our method can extract the roads from the satellite images robustly and quickly. It is also shown that our method can be extended to extract the linear features in other kinds of images.