Robust Road Extraction for High Resolution Satellite Images

Automatic road extraction is a critical feature for an efficient use of remote sensing imagery in most contexts. This paper proposes a robust geometric method to provide a first step extraction level. These results can be used as an initialization for other algorithms or as a starting point for manual road extraction. Results of the extraction are vectorized for GIS integration and for a better interaction with human experts that can refine the results. The algorithm is fast, has very few parameters and is only slightly affected by the image properties (resolution, noise). The algorithm is available in the open-source Orfeo toolbox.