ABSTRACT
Through establishing proper models, our paper presents a road extraction method based on the level set methods. An initial contour is first extracted by the combination of the threshold of intensity gradient and the fast marching method. Then the contour is moved with several speed models to remove the leakages, eliminate the noises and improve the smoothness until the curve finally reaches the accurate road edge. Our method makes full use of the characteristics of the roads in the high-resolution satellite images. The initialization process is simple and no priori topology information is needed. The level set methods allow us to get a better and more complete road network and handle the topological changes during the curve evolution. Numerical experiments have further demonstrated the effectiveness and advantages of our method.
