Segmentation of occluded sidewalks in satellite images

Accurate segmentation of sidewalks from satellite images can be required in various applications, for example giving walking directions to pedestrians and robot navigation. We propose a framework to construct sidewalk and crosswalk maps from satellite images. This is a challenging task, since typically sidewalks in satellite images are highly occluded by trees and their shadows and also there can be several objects on maps that have similar appearance with sidewalks. In our framework, we initially segment visible sidewalks by their appearance and then complete the tree-occluded areas by posing the problem as an image-inpainting task with multiple priors, which fuses the knowledge about roads, occluders and sidewalk structures. We present successful sidewalk segmentation results from satellite images, where sidewalks are highly occluded by trees.