Evaluation of Automatic Road Extraction Results from Sar Imagery

Automatic and semi-automatic methods for the extraction of topographic information are a present research topic. Especially for topographic mapping and navigation applications road extraction is important, but still not in practice. Due to the speckle effect and the limited width of roads with respect to the ground resolution automatic road extraction from SAR imagery is rather difficult. In this paper we want to investigate the potential of an automatic road extraction approach of the Technische Universität München, Germany. We apply the road extraction approach to two large test sites and evaluate the achieved results to two kinds of reference data: topographic map data and manually plotted vector data. For this purpose, the reference data are separated into three classes: highways, main roads, and secondary roads. The comparison shows that the extraction results depend on the road classes. Presently, for main roads quite satisfying results can be achieved. Regarding the completeness, highways and secondary roads cannot totally be extracted automatically, due to their width, visibility or a missing model for highways in the present approach. * Corresponding author