A new road extraction approach for low-frequency SAR images based on road appurtenance detection

Existing road extraction approaches have limitations on detecting roads covered by foliage, even for low-frequency SAR images. In this paper, a new approach is proposed to extract foliage-covered roads from low-frequency SAR images, by detecting road appurtenance alternatively. Road appurtenances alongside roads generally have consistent scattering and geometrical characteristics, which can be exploited by feature selection, classification and geometrical discrimination algorithms. The final result based on detection of guard trees indicates the effectiveness of the proposed approach.