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GPU-based normalized cuts for road extraction using satellite imagery

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Abstract

This paper presents a GPU implementation of normalized cuts for road extraction problem using panchromatic satellite imagery. The roads have been extracted in three stages namely pre-processing, image segmentation and post-processing. Initially, the image is pre-processed to improve the tolerance by reducing the clutter (that mostly represents the buildings, vegetation, and fallow regions). The road regions are then extracted using the normalized cuts algorithm. Normalized cuts algorithm is a graph-based partitioning approach whose focus lies in extracting the global impression (perceptual grouping) of an image rather than local features. For the segmented image, post-processing is carried out using morphological operations – erosion and dilation. Finally, the road extracted image is overlaid on the original image. Here, a GPGPU (General Purpose Graphical Processing Unit) approach has been adopted to implement the same algorithm on the GPU for fast processing. A performance comparison of this proposed GPU implementation of normalized cuts algorithm with the earlier algorithm (CPU implementation) is presented. From the results, we conclude that the computational improvement in terms of time as the size of image increases for the proposed GPU implementation of normalized cuts. Also, a qualitative and quantitative assessment of the segmentation results has been projected.

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Acknowledgements

The IKONOS image covering Hobart, Australia was provided by the courtesy of GeoEye. The authors would like to thank Dr H Honne Gowda from KSTA, Bangalore, India, for providing the QuickBird image. Also, the authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments that helped in improving this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Aerospace Engineering, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, 560 012, India.

    J SENTHILNATH, S SINDHU & S N OMKAR

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  1. J SENTHILNATH
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  2. S SINDHU
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Correspondence to S N OMKAR.

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SENTHILNATH, J., SINDHU, S. & OMKAR, S.N. GPU-based normalized cuts for road extraction using satellite imagery. J Earth Syst Sci 123, 1759–1769 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12040-014-0513-1

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