Semiautomatic Road Extraction by Dynamic Programming Optimisation in the Object Space: Single Image Case

This article proposes a novel road extraction methodology from digital images. The innovation is based on the dynamic programming (DP) algorithm to carry out the optimisation process in the object space, instead of doing it in the image space such as the DP traditional methodologies. Road features are traced in the object space, which implies that a rigorous mathematical model is necessary to be established between image and object space points. It is required that the operator measures a few seed points in the image space to describe sparsely and coarsely the roads, which must be transformed into the object space to make possible the initialisation of the DP optimisation process. Although the methodology can operate in different modes (mono-plotting or stereoplotting), and with several image types, including multisensor images, this paper presents details of our single image methodology, along with the experimental results. * Corresponding author.