Directional texture information for connecting road segments in high spatial resolution satellite images

This paper addresses the use of directional textural information for connecting road segments. In urban scene, some roads are occluded by buildings, casting shadow of buildings, trees, and cars on streets. Automatic extraction of road network from remotely sensed high resolution imagery is generally hindered by them. The results of automatic road network extraction will be incomplete. To overcome this problem, several perceptual grouping algorithms are often used based on similarity, proximity, continuation, and symmetry. Roads have directions and are connected to adjacent roads with certain angles. The directional information is used to guide road fragments connection based on roads directional inertia or characteristics of road junctions. In the primitive stage, roads are extracted with textural and direction information automatically with certain length of linearity. The primitive road fragments are connected based on the directional information to improve the road network. Experimental results show some contribution of this approach for completing road network, specifically in urban area.