Identification of Roads from RS Images

As a significant role for traffic management, city planning, road monitoring, GPS navigation and map updating, the technology of road extraction from a remote sensing (RS) image has been a hot research topic in recent years. In the project, after analysing different road features and road models, the road extraction methods were classified into the classification-based methods, knowledge-based methods, mathematical morphology, active contour model, and dynamic programming. Firstly, the road features, road model, existing difficulties and interference factors for road extraction were analysed. Secondly, the principle of road extraction, the advantages and disadvantages of various methods and research achievements were briefly highlighted. Then, the comparisons of the different road extraction algorithms were performed, including road features, test samples and shortcomings. Finally, the research results in recent years were summarized emphatically. It is obvious that only using one kind of road features is hard to get an excellent extraction effect.