A Morphological Model for Extracting Road Networks from High-Resolution Satellite Images

Urban planning depends strongly on information extracted from high-resolution satellite images such as buildings and roads features. Nowadays, most of the available extraction techniques and methods are supervised, and they require intensive labor work to clean irrelevant features and to correct shapes and boundaries. In this paper, a new model is implemented to overcome the limitations and to correct the problems of the known and conventional techniques of urban feature extraction specifically road network. The major steps in the model are the enhancement of the image, the segmentation of the enhanced image, the application of the morphological operators, and finally the extraction of the road network. The new model is more accurate position wise and requires less effort and time compared to the traditional supervised and semi-supervised urban extraction methods such as simple edge detection techniques or manual digitization. Experiments conducted on high-resolution satellite images prove the high accuracy and the efficiency of the new model. The positional accuracy of the extracted road features compared to the manual digitized ones, the counted number of detected road segments, and the percentage of completely closed and partially closed curves prove the efficiency and accuracy of the new model.