Automated Road Segment Extraction by Grouping Road Objects

This article presents an automatic methodology for extraction of road segments from high-resolution aerial images. The method is based on a set of four road objects and another set of connection rules among road objects. Each road object is a local representation of an approximately straight road fragment and its construction is based on combination of polygons describing all relevant image edges, according to some rules embodying road knowledge. Each road segments is composed by a sequence of connected road objects, being each sequence of this type can be geometrically structured as a chain of contiguous quadrilaterals. Experiments carried out with high-resolution aerial images showed that the proposed methodology is very promising for extracting road segments. This article presents the fundamentals of the method, and the experimental results as well. * Corresponding author.