Semi-automatic Extraction of Ribbon Roads Form High Resolution Remotely Sensed Imagery by Cooperation between Angular Texture Signature and Template Matching

Road tracking is a promising technique to increase the efficiency of road mapping. In this paper an improved road tracker, based on cooperation between angular texture signature and template matching, is presented. Our tracker uses parabola to model the road trajectory and to predict the position of next road centreline point. It employs angular texture signature to get the exact moving direction of current road centreline point, and moves forward one predefined step along the direction to reach a new position, and then uses curvature change to verify the new added road point whether right enough. We also build compactness of angular texture signature polygon to check whether the angular texture signature is suitable to be used to go on tracking. When angular texture signature fails, least squares template matching is then employed instead. Cooperation between angular texture signature and template matching can reliably extract continuous and homogenous ribbon roads on high resolution remotely sensed imagery. ∗ Corresponding author