Abstract
Nowadays automatic road extraction from satellite imageries is considered as one of the most important research trends in the field of remote sensing. This paper presents a method for automatic extraction of road centerlines from synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery. During the first step, three features, namely the direction of the least total radiance, the corresponding radiance, and the contrast are extracted to define the road characteristics by the backscatter coefficient of each pixel and its neighboring pixels from the SAR imagery. The fusion of the extracted features is carried out in the next step for detection of the road areas by using a fuzzy inference system. Afterwards, the morphology skeletonization is applied on the road areas to extract the road skeleton. Then some interested seed points are extracted so that they could be used in a snake model, which is employed to connect the seed points in order to form up the road centerlines. The proposed algorithm is tested on different parts of TerraSAR-X images. The experimental results reveal that the proposed method is effective in terms of correctness, completeness, and quality.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Bentabet L., Jodouin S., Ziou D., & Vaillancourt J. (2003). Road vectors update using SAR imagery: a snake-based method. IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, 41(8), 1785–1803.
Butenuth M., & Heipke C. (2012). Network snakes: graph-based object delineation with active contour models. Machine Vision and Applications, 23(1), 91–109.
Caltagirone, F., Spera, P., Vigliotti, R., & Manoni, G. (1998). SkyMed/COSMO mission overview. In Geoscience and remote sensing symposium proceedings, 1998. IGARSS’98. 1998 I.E. International, 1998 (Vol. 2, pp. 683–685). IEEE.
Chen, Y., Gu, Y., Gu, J., & Yang, J. (2005). Particle filter based road detection in SAR image. In Microwave, antenna, propagation and EMC technologies for wireless communications, 2005. MAPE 2005. IEEE International Symposium on, 2005 (Vol. 1, pp. 301–305). IEEE.
Dell’Acqua F., Gamba P., & Lisini G. (2003a). Improvements to urban area characterization using multitemporal and multiangle SAR images. IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, 41(9), 1996–2004.
Dell’Acqua F., Gamba P., & Lisini G. (2003b). Road map extraction by multiple detectors in fine spatial resolution SAR data1. Canadian Journal of Remote Sensing, 29(4), 481–490.
Hedman K., Stilla U., Lisini G., & Gamba P. (2010). Road network extraction in VHR SAR images of urban and suburban areas by means of class-aided feature-level fusion. IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, 48(3), 1294–1296.
Henderson F. M., & Xia Z.-G. (1997). SAR applications in human settlement detection, population estimation and urban land use pattern analysis: a status report. IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, 35(1), 79–85.
Huber, R., & Lang, K. (2001). Road extraction from high-resolution airborne SAR using operator fusion. In Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, 2001. IGARSS’01. IEEE 2001 International, 2001 (Vol. 6, pp. 2813–2815). IEEE.
Jeon B.-K., Jang J.-H., & Hong K.-S. (2002). Road detection in spaceborne SAR images using a genetic algorithm. IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, 40(1), 22–29.
Kass M., Witkin A., & Terzopoulos D. (1988). Snakes: active contour models. International Journal of Computer Vision, 1(4), 321–331.
Li, S.-y., Yang, W., Yang, H., & Sun, H. (2008). Road extraction from high resolution dual-polarization SAR images over urban areas. In International Conference on Earth Observation Data Processing and Analysis, 2008 (pp. 72850Q-72850Q-72810). International Society for Optics and Photonics.
Lisini G., Tison C., Tupin F., & Gamba P. (2006). Feature fusion to improve road network extraction in high-resolution SAR images. IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters, 3(2), 217–221.
Lisini G., Gamba P., Dell’Acqua F., & Holecz F. (2011). First results on road network extraction and fusion on optical and SAR images using a multi-scale adaptive approach. International Journal of Image and Data Fusion, 2(4), 363–375.
Liu J., Sui H., Tao M., Sun K., & Mei X. (2013). Road extraction from SAR imagery based on an improved particle filtering and snake model. International Journal of Remote Sensing, 34(22), 8199–8214. doi:10.1080/01431161.2013.835082.
Mamdani, E. H., & Assilian, S. (1975). An experiment in linguistic synthesis with a fuzzy logic controller. International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 7(1), 1–13.
McIlhagga W. (2011). The Canny edge detector revisited. International Journal of Computer Vision, 91(3), 251–261.
Negri M., Gamba P., Lisini G., & Tupin F. (2006). Junction-aware extraction and regularization of urban road networks in high-resolution SAR images. IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, 44(10), 2962–2971.
Ravanbakhsh M., Heipke C., & Pakzad K. (2008). Road junction extraction from high‐resolution aerial imagery. The Photogrammetric Record, 23(124), 405–423.
Roth, A. (2003). TerraSAR-X: a new perspective for scientific use of high resolution spaceborne SAR data. In Remote Sensing and Data Fusion over Urban Areas, 2003. 2nd GRSS/ISPRS Joint Workshop on, 22–23 May 2003 (pp. 4–7). doi:10.1109/dfua.2003.1219947.
Stilla, U., & Hedman, K. (2010). Feature fusion based on bayesian network theory for automatic road extraction. In Radar Remote Sensing of Urban Areas (pp. 69–86). Springer.
Tupin F., Maitre H., Mangin J.-F., Nicolas J.-M., & Pechersky E. (1998). Detection of linear features in SAR images: application to road network extraction. IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, 36(2), 434–453.
Tupin F., Houshmand B., & Datcu M. (2002). Road detection in dense urban areas using SAR imagery and the usefulness of multiple views. IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, 40(11), 2405–2414.
Wessel B. (2004). Road network extraction from SAR imagery supported by context information. The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, 35, 360–366.
Wiedemann C. (2003). External evaluation of road networks. The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, 34(3/W8), 93–98.
Xu C., & Prince J. L. (1998). Snakes, shapes, and gradient vector flow. IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 7(3), 359–369.
Zadeh L. A. (1968). Fuzzy algorithms. Information and Control, 12(2), 94–102.
Zarrinpanjeh N., Samadzadegan F., & Schenk T. (2013). A new ant based distributed framework for urban road map updating from high resolution satellite imagery. Computers & Geosciences, 54, 337–350.
Zhou G., Cui Y., Chen Y., Yang J., Rashvand H., & Yamaguchi Y. (2011). Linear feature detection in polarimetric SAR images. IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, 49(4), 1453–1463.
Zimmermann H. J. (2001). Fuzzy set theory-and its applications. Springer.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
About this article
Cite this article
Saati, M., Amini, J. & Maboudi, M. A Method for Automatic Road Extraction of High Resolution SAR Imagery. J Indian Soc Remote Sens 43, 697–707 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12524-015-0454-4
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12524-015-0454-4