A Novel Method for Exactly Locating Road Intersections in Aerial Images

Road intersections in aerial images could provide lots of geography information, and thus are very valuable for navigation systems, e.g. cruise missile or UAV (unmanned Aerial Vehicle) navigation system. However, there are few algorithms presented to exactly locate road intersections, and mostly the computational costs of them are very expensive, which can not meet the on-line processing requirement. In this paper, we present a method for exactly locating road intersections. Firstly, we limit the candidate area around the road region, and employ the FAST (Features from Accelerated Segment Test) corner detector to obtain some candidate road intersections. Then, a novel model is proposed to confirm and classify the real road intersections. Finally, the MS (Mean-Shift) algorithm is used here to move them to their most proper positions. Several aerial images are taken to test the effectiveness of our method.Experimental results demonstrated that the correctness and veracity are both acceptable, and the cost of our method is very low.