A Knowledge-based Research for Road Extraction from Digital Satellite Images

Abstract:

As a kind of base geographical information, road extraction from satellite images is important in the practice and theory of automatic satellite images recognition, and its results can be used for the data updating of geographical data base. Using existing approaches to automatic road extraction from satellite images for reference and according to the road properties in China, this paper presents a new road extraction method that combines image processing techniques with artificial intelligence methodology. In this approach, an operator is applied to an image to enhance the road information first, then road detection based on the shape index and other priori knowledge is performed to find possible road points. After using more contextual information or global constraints to extend the road seeds to form a road segment, the existence of a road is inferred and the gap between the road segments is connected by employing knowledge-based rules. Finally, experimental results on SPOT data are elaborated.

Key words:

road extraction; satellite images; expert system; geographical information system

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