AUTOMATIC DETECTION AND RECOGNITION OF ROAD INTERSECTIONS FOR ROAD EXTRACTION FROM IMAGERY

Abstract. Automatic road extraction from remote sensing imagery is very useful for many applications involved with geographic information. For road extraction of urban areas, road intersections offer stable and reliable information for extraction of road network, with higher completeness and accuracy. In this paper, a segmentation-shape analysis based method is proposed to detect road intersections and their branch directions from an image. In the region of interest, it uses the contour shape of the segmented-intersection area to form a feature vector representing its geometric information. The extracted feature vector is then matched with some template vectors in order to find the best matched intersection pattern, obtain the type of intersection and the direction of connected roads. The experimental analysis are carried out with ISPRS Vaihingen and Toronto images. The experimental results show that the proposed method can extract most of the road intersections correctly. For the Vaihingen image, the the completeness and correctness are 81% and 87%, respectfully, while for the Toronto image, the the completeness and correctness are 78% and 85%, respectfully. It can help to build more correct and complete road network.