Automatic Road Detection and Extraction From MultiSpectral Images Using a New Hierarchical Object-based Method

Road detection and Extraction is one of the most important issues in photogrammetry, remote sensing and machine vision. A great deal of research has been done in this area based on multispectral images, which are mostly relatively good results. In this paper, a novel automated and hierarchical object-based method for detecting and extracting of roads is proposed. This research is based on the Mean Shift Segmentation Method and the HSI Color Model for Road Detection. Initially, the multispectral images were segmented and then NDVI and NDWI spectral indices were created. In addition, the segmented images were transformed to HSI color space. Then, primary road surfaces were detected by Hue, NDVI, and NDWI spectral indices. In addition, the centerlines of roads were extracted using Voronoi diagram-based technique. After extracting of centerlines of primary roads, dangle errors were removed with emphasis on the topological rules and the lengths of dangles. In order to evaluate the proposed method, the Moonah multi-spectral Image provided by the ISPRS was used. According to the evaluation results, the parameters of completeness, accuracy and quality of the proposed method are, on average, estimated to be 98%, 84% and 84%. In addition, the results of the proposed method were compared with the results of five state of-the-art methods. The results demonstrate the high capability of the proposed method in detecting and extracting roads from satellite multispectral images in urban areas.