An approach for automatic road extraction from digital aerial imagery is presented. The extraction is based on a semantic model for roads. The images are divided into different so-called “global contexts”: rural, forest, and urban. Different parts of the road model and different strategies are used in the different global contexts. In rural areas, a multi-scale approach is employed to find init...

An up-to-date review of rural road accident statistics for Iran is presented The review considers sources of accident statistics in Iran and the means by which they are collected. The statistics are considered in relation to accident causal and risk factors. A comparison is made with statistics available for other countries at a similar stage of development and countries with highly developed e...

The road-effect zone is the area in which ecological effects extend outward from a road. Dispersed off-highway vehicle (OHV; e.g., four-wheelers and snowmachines) activity on rural road networks creates a disturbance that reduces the effective amount of wildlife habitat and therefore has the potential for an extensive road-effect zone. Consequently, land managers must consider the trade-offs be...

BACKGROUND The 5(th) Iran National Development Plan, 2011-2015, has emphasized on expansion of rural asphalt roads. This article aims to illustrate the trend of deaths caused by rural road traffic crashes (RTCs) and its association with length of the rural roads in Iran. METHODS We carried out a retrospective analysis on secondary data for the period from 2005 to 2010. The Iranian Forensic Me...

BACKGROUND Urban birth or upbringing increase schizophrenia risk. Though unknown, the causes of these urban-rural differences have been hypothesized to include, e.g., infections, diet, toxic exposures, social class, or an artefact due to selective migration. METHODS We investigated the hypothesis that traffic related exposures affect schizophrenia risk and that this potential effect is respon...

The problem of collisions between road users and trains at rail level crossings (RLXs) remains resistant to current countermeasures. One factor underpinning these collisions is poor Situation Awareness (SA) on behalf of the road user involved (i.e. not being aware of an approaching train). Although this is a potential threat at any RLX, the factors influencing SA may differ depending on whether...

Road traffic injuries and fatalities are increasing in Ghana. Police-collected crash and injury data for the period 1994-1998 were aggregated and analyzed using the MAAP5 accident analysis package developed by the Transport Research Laboratory, U.K. Published results of recent transport-related epidemiological and other surveys provided an additional data source. According to the 1994-1998 poli...

BACKGROUND Road traffic crashes are considered by the WHO to be the most important global cause of death from injury. However, this may not be true for large areas of rural Asia where road vehicles are uncommon. The issue is important, since emphasising the importance of road traffic crashes risks switching resources to urban areas, away from already underfunded rural regions. In this study, we...

People living in rural and remote regions of Australia are significantly over-represented in road transport-related fatality and injury figures. The costs of these events are also significantly higher than for similar injuries in urban communities. In Queensland in the year 2000, for example, the risk of dying (per capita) in a rural versus urban crash was 4.2 times higher, with costs 2-3 times...

In this paper we report on research on road extraction at TUM (Technische Universität München). We propose a scheme for road extraction in rural areas that integrates three different modules with specific strengths. The first module employs local grouping and uses multiple scales and context to reliably extract most parts of the road network. In order to connect these parts, the second module e...