Road Centerline Tracking From High Resolution Satellite Imagery By Least Squares Templates Matching

Road information is very important for topographic mapping, transportation application, urban planning and other related application fields. Therefore, automatic detection of road networks from spatial imagery, such as aerial photos and satellite imagery can play a central role in road information acquisition. In this paper, we use least squares correlation matching alone for road center tracking and show that it works. We assumed that (bright) road centerlines would be visible in the image. We further assumed that within a same road segment, there would be only small differences in brightness values. This algorithm works by defining a template around a user-given input point, which shall lie on a road centerline, and then by matching the template against the image along the orientation of the road under consideration. Once matching succeeds, new match proceeds by shifting a matched target window further along road orientation at the target window. By repeating the process above, we obtain a series of points, which lie on a road centerline successively. A 1m resolution IKONOS images over Seoul and Daejeon were used for tests. The results showed that this algorithm could extract road centerlines in any orientation and help in fast and exact he ad-up digitization/vectorization of cartographic images.