Cooperative methods for road tracking in aerial imagery

A description is given of research in digital mapping and image understanding in the area of automated feature extraction from aerial imagery. The authors discuss a system for road tracking, ARF (A Road Follower), that uses multiple cooperative methods for extracting information about road location and structure from complex aerial imagery. This system is a multilevel architecture for image analysis that follows for cooperation among low-level processes and aggregation of information by high-level analysis components. Two low-level road tracking methods have been implemented: road-surface texture correlation and road-edge following. Each works independently to establish a model of the centerline of the road, its width, and other local properties