Fourier Shape Descriptors of Pixel Footprints for Road Extraction from Satellite Images

In this paper, an automatic road tracking method is presented for detecting roads from satellite images. This method is based on shape classification of a local homogeneous region around a pixel. The local homogeneous region is enclosed by a polygon, called the pixel footprint. We introduce a spoke wheel operator to obtain the pixel footprint and propose a Fourier-based approach to classify footprints for automatic seeding and growing of the road tracker. We experimentally demonstrate that our proposed road tracker can extract the centerlines of roads with sharp turns and intersections effectively, and has relatively small amount of leakage.