Journal of the Indian Society of Remote Sensing

https://doi.org/10.1007/s12524-019-01077-4 (0123456789().,-volV)(0123456789().
,- volV)

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Semiautomatic Road Extraction Framework Based on Shape Features

and LS-SVM from High-Resolution Images
Pramod Kumar Soni1 • Navin Rajpal1 • Rajesh Mehta2

Received: 13 June 2019 / Accepted: 6 December 2019

Ó Indian Society of Remote Sensing 2020

Abstract
Road network delineation from remote sensing imagery is useful in many applications related to humans in present days as
it provides meaningful information which is very helpful in the field of transportation and other support systems of human
civilization. However, the road network extraction from remote sensing images is a challenging problem because of
various properties of road network altered by different factors. In this paper, a supervised multistage framework based on
least square support vector machine (LS-SVM), mathematical morphology and road shape features is proposed to extract
road networks from remote sensing images. In the first stage, after denoising the image using the nonlinear filter, the image
is segmented using LS-SVM into two classes’ road or non-road but some non-road components like building structures,
shadows of trees and other roads like objects are also classified as the road network. In the second stage, the morphology
and primary shape features are used to remove the non-road objects. Finally, road centerlines are extracted using a method
based on Euclidean distance transformation. The experimental results reflect the accuracy of the proposed work as
compared to other road extraction methods.

Keywords Road extraction  LS-SVM  Shape features  Morphology

Introduction processing by retrieval, extraction and integration of

Roads have played a significant part in human civilization
since ancient times, but due to the technological advance-
ment, the role of road network becomes more important in
the present era as it helps in-vehicle navigation, traffic
management, planning of urbanization, dealing with natu-
ral disasters and significance in the area of geographical,
political, health and social environment. The study of
satellite images has transformed the domain of image
& Pramod Kumar Soni
pramod.soni0007@gmail.com
Navin Rajpal
navin.rajpal@ipu.ac.in
Rajesh Mehta
rajesh.mehta@thapar.edu
1
University School of Information Communication and
Technology, Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University
Dwarka, New Delhi, India
2
Thapar Institute of Engineering and Technology, Patiala,
Punjab, India
information. The high-resolution RSI from satellites such
as Quick Bird, IKONOS, WorldView2, WorldView3 and
GeoEye provides a large amount of information that can be
used to update geographical information systems (GIS)
database (Mena 2003) on intelligent basis that help in
analyzing road maps in real-time environment in an eco-
nomical manner (Lehtomäki et al. 2010). However, the
delineation of the road network is an exigent exercise for
researchers since the unfolding of satellite imaging. The
main issues in road network delineation from remote
sensing data are road features extraction, which can be
altered by weather, vegetation, sensor type, and spectral
resolution. The road features broadly classified into the
following categories: geometric (road shapes), radiometric
(color or gray levels), topological (road intersections) and
texture (regional characteristics). These features can affect
the road network extraction process directly. Conventional
methods of updating GIS, however, are not effective in
real-time environments because they are time-consuming
and expensive (Jeyapalan and Bhagawati 2000) but have
high accuracy. Incorporating real-time data into a GIS

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environment generates unmatched breaks for multi-tem-
poral and spatial analysis alike observing variations in
built-up areas and investing how these variations interact
with other geographical features like vegetation. Apart
from these, we can compare the current GIS data with
previous data to obtain better results. So, it is necessary to
develop an automatic or semiautomatic method for
extracting road network.
In this present study, an attempt has been made to
increase the accuracy of road network extraction in a
multifaceted environment. For this purpose, a multistage
framework based on region-based classification and shape
features has been proposed. The general approach in
region-based methods includes the classification or seg-
mentation of road or non-road regions in RSI. Further, the
additional operations are applied to delineate the road
network.
However, the present study introduces a framework,
wherein the denoised image is classified using LS-SVM
into the road and non-road classes. The framework further
moves ahead with the elimination of non-road components
and delineation of the road network from the classified
image. This entire processing is executed using morpho-
logical operations and shaped feature algorithm. The cen-
terline is extracted using the euclidean distance-based
method.
In literature, various road network extraction methods
from high-resolution RSI have been proposed by various
researchers. An exhaustive survey of various road extrac-
tion techniques is presented by Mena (2003) and Wang
et al. (2016). Prevailing road network extraction methods
can be categorized as follows: (1) classification-based
methods, (2) knowledge-based (KB) methods, (3) mor-
phology-based methods and (4) active contour-based
methods. However, the performance depends on the
training data used for classification. In some recent works,
the road network is extracted by a cascaded end-to-end
convolutional neural network (CasNet). This method can
detect the road network and extract their centerlines all
together (Cheng et al. 2017). Wei et al. (2017) conceptu-
alize a road network extraction using refined CNN. An
object-based automatic road extraction method is proposed
by Miao et al. (2015) where road features are segmented
and then filtered using object’s features and SVM is used
for classification. Wang et al. (2015) proposed a semiau-
tomated method using a neural dynamic framework based
on FSM and deep learning. Sghaier and Lepage (2016) use
texture analysis, beamlet transform and SVM to extract
road network. Bakhtiari et al. (2017) proposed a semiau-
tomated method for road extraction using edge-based
segmentation, SVM and morphological operation. Song
and Civco (2004) propose a road extraction method using
SVM and region-based segmentation using shape features.
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Journal of the Indian Society of Remote Sensing
The KB method uses geometric features to detect specific
shaped objects. However, they suffer from over extraction
and occlusion. Gao et al. (2018) proposed a KB method
based on segmentation and shape features. Hu et al. (2007)
proposed an automated method by tracking road footprints
using a toe-finding algorithm and using shape features for
the pruning road network. Extended Kalman filter is
applied to demarcate road network by Movaghati et al.
(2010).
Mathematical morphology in combination with other
segmentation and classification methods are used to
delineate the road network from RSI and gained popularity
due to their speed, less computation and accuracy but their
performance depends on numerous factors such as choice
of structuring element. Géraud and Mouret (2004) use
morphology with Markov random field to extract road
network, and TPA (texture progressive and morphology)
are used by Mena and Malpica (2005) for vectorization of
the road network of the semi-urban area. Singh and Garg
(2013) used segmentation based on adaptive thresholding
and mathematical morphology to obtain the road network.
Sujatha and Selvathi (2015) present an automatic method
using connected component analysis in conjunction with
morphological operations for removing non-road elements.
Chaudhuri et al. (2012) used directional morphological
filters and segmentation using supervised homogeneity for
road extraction from the urban area RSI. Active contour-
based methods use snake and level set to represent the
contour model to delineate the road network. Level set and
SVM are merged to delineate road network by Abdollahi
et al. (2018). All the methods of road extraction from high-
resolution RSI work on features extracted either at the pixel
level, region wise or shape features. The pixel-level
methods rely on information extracted by pixels such as
line, edges, magnitude and orientation which are used at
higher-level processing to extract road, whereas in region-
based methods first the whole region is segmented into
regions of road or others and in the second step further
refinement is made to extract road network accurately. The
KB method uses advanced information for extraction of the
road network.
The methods of the road can be automated or semiau-
tomated; a fully automated method does not require an
operator but this is not realistic for getting accurate and
precise road networks due to various restrictive factors.
Furthermore, various factors, such as sensors and weather,
alter the various features of the road network in RSI, which
in turn increases the complexity. In contrast, in semiauto-
matic methods, a human operator is used, who plays a key
role in identification or road network and non-road objects
in the initial phase of the method and reduces the com-
plexity resulting in improved accuracy.
Journal of the Indian Society of Remote Sensing

Data Set

Data set # 1 The images used for the experiment are

obtained from Vplab. These images are of different areas
like developed urban, developed suburban, emerging sub-
urban and emerging urban, each of size 512 9 512, having
a resolution of 1 m per pixel and obtained through the
‘‘Quick Bird’’ satellite.
Data set # 2 It is a publically accessible road data set
delivered by Türetken et al. (2012), contains 14 aerial
images of the semi-urban area of the spatial resolution of
1.5 m per pixel and images are of complex background and
occlusion caused by trees is present.

Proposed Road Network Extraction Method

In the present work, a multistage semiautomated frame-

work is proposed to delineate the road network from high-
resolution RSI. After preprocessing of the image, the pro-
posed approach is divided into two stages such as classi-
fication and road object analysis. In the first stage, LS-
SVM is used to classify the whole image into road and non-
road (undesired) components. During the second stage, the
non-road (undesired) components are classified as a road
region, and in the first stage are eliminated using mor-
phological operations and shape features. The flowchart of
all the stages involved in the implementation of the mul- Fig. 1 Flowchart of the proposed research work
tistage framework is described in Fig. 1.
optical consistency of RSI. Its nature is multiplicative, and
Image Preprocessing its PDF is as follows.

The original remote sensing image suffers from the noise
that occurs during image procurement from sensors, poor
illumination, thermal effects and electronic circuits, which
may limit the interpretability of information. The nature of
noise in remotely sensed imagery is either additive or
multiplicative. The random variation impulsive (Gaussian)
noise and salt and pepper noise are additive in nature. The
electronic circuits used in the imaging system of satellites
are the main source of random variation impulsive noise,
and its probability distribution function (PDF) is as
follows.
1 ðxaÞ2
PðxÞ ¼ pffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi  e 2r2 ; ð1Þ
2pr2
where x represents the intensity level, a is the mean of
function, and r is the standard deviation of the noise.
Faulty transmission during image capturing corrupts the
intensity of pixels and set alternatively minimum or max-
imum value, generate ‘‘salt and pepper’’ noise in the image.
Speckle noise is generated due to the coherent recon-
struction of RSI that bounds the understanding of the
x/1 x
YðxÞ ¼ ea; ð2Þ
ða  1Þ!aa
where a2 is the variance and x is the intensity value. In the
literature, it is observed that denoising in the RSI is per-
formed by many methods by various researchers (Al-Amri
et al. 2010) and every method has its own pros and cons.
For fruitful extraction of the road network from RSI, edges
preservation is the main criteria and the linear filter is not
suitable for this task (Anil and Natarajan 2010). In pro-
posed work to reduce the noise from RSI, median filter is
efficiently applied along with the removal of outliers
without conceding on the sharpness of edges.
Classification Stage
After eliminating the noise from the remotely sensed
image, the road network can be extracted either by seg-
mentation or by any classification method. The main
objective of this phase is to divide the whole image into
two classes of road and non-road. Although researchers

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employed various methods of classification that may be
supervised or unsupervised (Wang et al. 2016), in this
work, LS-SVM which an efficient variant of SVM is used
for classification due to better classification performance
and easy to deal with complex scenes in remote sensing
images.
LS-SVM
SVM is a supervised classification method, which is used
for classification of an image into different classes or
regions (Cortes and Vapnik 1995) and has shown superior
results as compared to conventional methods like neural
networks. The LS-SVM discussed by Hanbay et al. (2009)
is a variant of SVM due to the reformation of the objective
Algorithm 1: Road and Non-road classification using LS-SVM
1. For each road and non-road class select region of interest as training data.
2. Choose RBF kernel, penalty parameter C other kernel arguments are chosen using tenfold cross-validation
3. Uses the optimized variables based on cross-validation defined in Step 2 for the training purpose of LS-SVM.
4. Perform classification of the whole image using LS-SVM model obtained in Step 3
function. It uses equality constraints in place of inequalities
in orthodox SVM and a sum squared error cost function;
these changes result in solving linear equations instead of a
convex quadratic program. The changes in objective
function significantly simplify optimization problem and
can be solved in less time. However, this reformulation
results in an increase in the size of the model of LS-SVM
as compared to SVM, to reduce the complexity and to
achieve sparseness; pruning methods are used (Hanbay
et al. 2009). The size of the LS-SVM model is larger than
SVM because it does not support vector selection and this
can be pruned using pruning techniques. The solution
process of LS-SVM is preferable to SVM due to less
computational encumbrance and high efficiency. For linear
LS-SVM linear classifier is described as:
FðxÞ ¼ signðwT x þ BÞ;
where B is real constant. In the case of nonlinear classifi-
cation, the classifier in dual space takes the following form:
" #
XN
FðxÞ ¼ sign ak Fk Kðx; xk Þ þ B ð4Þ
k¼1
where ai are positive real constants and B is real constant
and Kðx; xi Þ ¼ h/ðxÞ  /ðxi Þi; \   [ is an inner product,
and /ðxÞ is the nonlinear map from original space to
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Journal of the Indian Society of Remote Sensing
higher-dimensional space. The function estimation of LS-
SVM model takes the following form
X
N
FðxÞ ¼ ak Kðx; xk Þ þ B: ð5Þ
k¼1
The choice of kernel affects severely the performance of
SVM, so when the radial basis function (RBF) kernel is
used, two tuning parameters (c) for regularization constant
and (r) for the width of the kernel are added. The results of
LS-SVM can be described by Eq. 6 and

1; if x is classified as road
RðxÞ ¼ ð6Þ
0; otherwise:
The classification algorithm used in this work is defined
in Algorithm 1.
Road Object Analysis Stage
After the classification stage, the classified image still
encompasses some non-road components that are classified
as road area and few holes caused by occlusion of vehicles
or shadow of trees. To remove such regions and for filling,
holes morphological opening and hole filling operations are
performed. The non-road components from the classified
image are eliminated to some extent by morphological
operations, and additional processing is essential to
increase the quality and accuracy of road network extrac-
tion using geometric features analysis. The road network
has distinctive geometric features, different from other land
covers present in RSI. The previous work on shape analysis
shows that road is complex and irregular (Lu et al. 2009)
ð3Þ and roads are always elongated and there is a small vari-
ation in their curve. Therefore, road shape features can be
used to refine the extracted road network.
Area
The no. of pixels in a road component cannot be too less or
too more, so there must be a range in which the no of pixels
which constitute the area of an object lies and can set the
upper (AU) and lower (AL) limit of the area of the object.
Journal of the Indian Society of Remote Sensing
Any object that has the area between [AU, AL] is included
in the road network otherwise rejected.
Complexity Rate ðCRÞ
CR defines the shape complexity of the object and is
describes as
Ar
CR ¼ ; ð7Þ
PM2
where PM is the perimeter of the object and Ar is an area of
the component. The value CR is decided by its complexity
and it is directly related to the more complex the shape,
complex the shape more the rate.
Aspect Ratio of Bounding Rectangle ðABRÞ
The ABR of an object can be calculated as
LARB
ABR ¼ ; ð8Þ
WARB
where LARB is the length of the bounding rectangle and
WARB is the width of the bounding rectangle.
Extent ðEXÞ
Extent represents how rectangular shape is, how far it fills
the minimum bounding rectangle and defined as:
Ar
EX ¼ ; ð9Þ
SMBR
where Ar and SMBR denote the area of the object and the
area of the minimum bounding rectangle of the object. For
performing efficient refinement of road network from the
classified image, shape features algorithm is used. To label,
each disjoint component and geometric features of the road
network are extracted with the help of connected compo-
nent analysis. The road object refinement algorithm is
defined in Algorithm 2
Road Centerline Extraction
Centerline extraction from road network is an essential
challenging task. Various methods have been proposed by
many researchers for extracting centerlines of 2D images
such as; thinning-based or onion peeling (Chaudhuri et al.
2012), geodesic-based methods (Miao et al. 2014a, b),
level set marching methods (Ebert et al. 2002; Hassouna
and Farag 2005) and regression-based methods (Liu et al.
2016a). The results of different methods are far away from
satisfaction due to the spectral heterogeneity in land cover
of RSI and may generate large spurs. Thinning-based
methods are widely used as they generate the correct
component but require large computation and more itera-
tions. Geodesic-based methods use the shortest path for
computation, have lower computation cost and high speed
but the centerline extracted is near to the inner boundary.
Level set marching methods are robust in nature but it is
difficult to obtain energy function. Regression-based
methods use weighted least square to extract centerline but
results are inaccurate at road junctions. In this study, road
centerlines are extracted by using Euclidean distance
property. The Euclidean distance transformation is applied
to the skeleton of the binary image to get the distance from
the centerline to the edge and finally multiplying them to
the get centerline where every point on the centerline is the
distance to the edge. The unwanted small sections gener-
ated in the road centerline are removed by morphological
operation. The proposed method is computationally faster
and inexpensive along with generated centerline is cen-
tered, connected and one pixel thick.
Experiment Setting
The experiment for extraction and analysis of road network
from RSI are performed in the Matlab 2018a environment
on various images of the urban and suburban area. To
extract the road network and non-road regions binary LS-
SVM is used. For this, a certain region of interest of each
class (road and non-road class) is selected for the training
set, in such a way that there is no overlapping between two
classes and all other pixels that do not belong to any of the
class would be placed into a non-road class. The LS-SVM
is trained using training samples, and the function obtained
after training is used for classification of the image into the
road and non-road classes. The experimental result of the
classification of road and non-road classes using LS-SVM
on test images is shown in Fig. 2c. In the road object
refinement stage, the road network is extracted from the
classified image by filtering using morphological opera-
tions and fundamental shape features. The various
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 Journal of the Indian Society of Remote Sensing

Fig. 2 a Original image, b median filtered image, c LS-SVM classified image, d result of the closing operation, e image road object refinement,
f the centerline of the extracted road network, g ground truth road network and h overlapped image of the road map

Table 1 Shape feature

Area (A) Complex rate ðCRT Þ Aspect ratio of bounding box (ABR) Extent (EX)
thresholding parameters
500–50,000 30–50 Less than 4 \1

threshold limits of different fundamental shape features are
shown in Table 1. Finally, the centerline of the road net-
work is extracted by using euclidean distance transform
and spurs produced are removed by morphological
operations.
The experiments are accomplished to test the efficacy of
the introduced framework, the experiments are categorized
into images of semi-urban (test case 1), images belong to a
developed urban area (test case 2), images belong to a
developed urban area with grassland (test case 3) and aerial
image (test case 4).
not removed by ½AL  AU  and CRT values of shape fea-
tures algorithm. For the removal of such an object, we use
the elongation feature of the road that can be detected by
ABR parameter of road object refinement phase and results
are clearly reflected in Fig. 2e. The centerline extracted by
proposed method and the referenced road network are
shown in Fig. 2f, g. A broken road is clearly observed in
road network in Fig. 2d–f due to occlusion caused by
shadow of the tree.
Test Case 2

Test Case 1 In the second test case of experimental analysis, images

In test case 1, the test image belongs to the semi-urban
area, affected by various occlusions of trees; building
structures, vegetation and roads are discontinued at some
places. The shadows of the tree as underlined in Fig. 2b
create disturbance in road delineation process. The building
structures that are composed of road like material are not
removed in the classification phase and by morphological
filtering as shown in Fig. 2c, d. These structures are even
belong to a residential and developed urban area, where the
structure material of roads and building structures are the
same and creates a hurdle in road network delineation and
at road intersection the presence of non-road material
causing rapture in road extraction. The extraction of the
road from these types of images is a challenging task which
is appropriately handled by the proposed method and
appropriately described in this manuscript. The results are
explained in Fig. 3.

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Journal of the Indian Society of Remote Sensing

Fig. 3 a1–c1 Road reference

data shown in red in the original
image, a2–c2 LS-SVM
classified image, a3–c3 result of
closing operation, a4–c4 result
of road refinement, a5–c5
centerline of the extracted road
network and a6–c6 overlapped
image of the road map

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Fig. 4 a1–b1 Original image,
a2–b2 extracted road network
and a3–b3 centerline of
extracted road network
Test Case 3
In test case 3, images of the developed sub-urban area are
used to test the effectiveness of the proposed method, and
the road is situated amid a residential area’s barren land. A
small path leading to the houses of the residential area also
considered as a road. The delineation of road networks
from such type images is a problematic task as it is nec-
essary to remove the effect of shading of vegetation and
buildings which can generate a broken road network. The
framework proposed in this manuscript attempts to delin-
eate road network from such type of terrain, and experi-
mental results are shown in Fig. 4.
Test Case 4
In this case, all images are of aerial images that contain a
semi-urban area of the city and the road network area is
surrounded by shadows of trees that are creating obstacles
in road extraction. In these types of images, a path to
nearby houses along the road also exists that can be clas-
sified as the road network. The results of the proposed
method on aerial images are shown in Fig. 5, the reference
road network is shown in red in Fig. 5a1–c1, Fig. 5a3–c3
shows the delineated road network by proposed frame-
work, and centerline of road network is shown in Fig. 5a4–
c4.
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Journal of the Indian Society of Remote Sensing
Results and Evaluation
To estimate the proficiency of the designed framework for
extracting road networks from high-resolution RSI, the
delineated road network is compared with the reference
road network obtained by using GIMP and evaluation
method described in Fig. 6. The comparison is performed
on distinct quantitative measures proposed by Heipke et al.
(1997) such as completeness ðEcomp Þ, correctness ðEcorr Þ
and quality ðEQual Þ described as follows:
TP
Ecomp ¼ : ð10Þ
TP þ FN
The desired value of Ecomp is equal to 1, signifying that
100% roads are extracted.
TP
Ecorr ¼ : ð11Þ
TP þ FP
The desired value of Ecorr is equal to 1, indicating that
extracted roads are 100% actual roads.
TP
EQual ¼ : ð12Þ
TP þ FP þ FN
The desired value of EQual equal to 1 means extracted
roads are 100% correct and complete, where true positive
(TP) is the road pixels present in both reference road net-
work and road network extracted by the proposed method,
true negative (TN) are the pixels absent in both reference
and extracted road network. False positive (FP) is the
pixels that are absent in reference road data but present in
the extracted road network, and false negative (FN) is in
Journal of the Indian Society of Remote Sensing

Fig. 5 a1–c1 Original image,

a2–c2 LS-SVM classified
image, a3–c3 extracted road
network after road refinement
and a4–c4 centerline of
extracted road network

reference data but not present in the extracted road

network.
A number of images are considered for performing the
experiment, and they are classified into different areas with
levels of complexities like semi-urban, developed urban
and developed urban with grassland. The quantitative
performance of road network extraction results on images
of the different areas is presented in Table 2. Ecomp and
Ecorr can be biased metrics, one can be amplified at the cost
Fig. 6 Evaluation method of sinking another one, although EQual combines both
parameters and generates an overall measurement.

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Table 2 Quantitative analysis developed urban images (test case 2), the proposed method
Test cases Ecomp Ecorr EQual
attains higher Ecorr values while the method of Liu et al.
(2016b) attains the higher EQual values. Images in test case
Test case 1 3 have a huge area of thick forestry and grassland along
(Semi-urban) with building like structures that makes the task of road
Figure 2 delineation more tedious. The proposed method attains
Image I 96.05 96.5 92.82 higher values as compared to other methods in all three
Test case 2 parameters as shown in Table 3. In the case of aerial
(Developed urban) images of Data 2#, quantitative experimental results of
Figure 3 three images are shown in Table 2 and the results of two
Image II 76.23 91.99 71.48 images are compared with Huang and Zhang (2009), Miao
Image III 87.16 92.55 81.45 et al. (2013) and Miao et al. (2014a). These images are of a
Image IV 85.97 88.99 77.07 developed urban area with a large vegetative area along
Test case 3 with a road network. The comparative analysis of the
(Developed urban with grassland) proposed method with the above-mentioned methods is
Figure 4 summarized in Table 4. In the case of image 1, the pro-
Image V 87.39 74.9 67.6 posed method obtained the second best performance in
Image VI 94.17 63.83 61.41 Ecorr and EQual values and in the case of image 2, the
Test case 4 proposed method achieves the second best performance in
Aerial image EQual values. The results of proposed framework are best in
(Developed urban) the case of images semi-urban area but in the case of
Figure 5 developed urban area images, its performance is degraded
Image I 79.96 89.94 73.4 but still better than its counterparts. This is due to fact that
Image II 76.25 95.6 73.67 fully developed urban area has objects like buildings,
Image III 80.15 85.15 70.59
parking area, houses and some fragmented roads that have
the same spectral features like road along with the presence
of vegetative area. During the road extraction process,
these objects have been erroneously classified as road
networks. This results in an increase in FP pixels that
Comparative Analysis further degrade Ecomp and EQual parameters.

In order to elucidate the natural comparison of different Computational Time Comparison

methods of road network extraction, one image from each
test case is considered for comparison with other methods.
The road network extracted from Data 1# (Quick bird
images) is compared with other road network extracted by
Liu et al. (2016b), Miao et al. (2014a), Chaudhuri et al.
(2012) and Singh and Garg (2013), and quantitative com-
parison is summarized in Table 3. The underlined values
are the best results, and values marked as bold are the next
optimum choice. In the case of the semi-urban area, the
proposed method obtains greater EQual values, which is a
comprehensive evaluation criterion but in the case of
The time taken by each phase of the multistage framework,
i.e., classification phase and road object analysis phase, is
by denoted by SVT and RET, and the computational time
comparison is illustrated in Table 5. The proposed
methodology takes more time than (Miao et al. 2014a) in
the classification stage, and in the case of the road
extraction stage, it takes more time than (Huang and Zhang
2009).

Table 3 Analysis of
Authors Image I (test case 1 Image II (test case 2) Image V (test case 3)
experimental results with the
existing methods on Data 1# Ecomp Ecorr EQual Ecomp Ecorr EQual Ecomp Ecorr EQual
each image of size 512 9 512
Liu et al. (2016b) 89.4 73.1 67.3 92.1 76.2 71.6 62.3 64.5 46.4
Miao et al. (2014a) 90.4 72.8 67.6 88.3 79.8 72.2 55.4 68.3 44.1
Chaudhuri et al. (2012) 88.7 70.5 64.6 91.6 63.0 66.2 61.7 62.4 31.0
Singh and Garg (2013) 95.32 96.52 92.15
Proposed method 96.4 96.50 92.82 76.23 91.99 71.48 87.39 74.9 67.6

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Table 4 Analysis of
Authors Image 1 (test case 4) (861 9 700) Image III (test case 4) (855 9 747)
experimental results with the
existing methods on Data 2# Ecomp Ecorr EQual Ecomp Ecorr EQual

Huang and Zhang (2009) 80.4 77.3 65.1 87.2 78.5 70.4
Miao et al. (2013) 68.1 85.7 61.2 68.1 90.2 63.4
Miao et al. (2014a) 92.2 97.7 90.2 85.7 97.2 83.6
Proposed method 79.96 89.94 73.4 80.15 85.15 70.59

Table 5 Computational time

Image Huang and Zhang (2009) Miao et al. (2014a) Proposed
comparison: SVT denotes
classification time and RET 903 9 722
refers to road extraction time
SVT(s) 245.36 67.34 70.48
RET(s) 0.08 247.98 8.8921

Conclusions resolution satellite imagery. In ICMLC 2010—The 2nd interna-

In this work, a multistage framework has been proposed to
delineate the road network from high-resolution RSI using
LS-SVM and fundamental shape features. In the proposed
approach, after denoising using a nonlinear filter, road and
non-road parts are classified using LS-SVM. Then, using
road object analysis algorithm, non-road parts are removed,
and finally, the road network is delineated from high-res-
olution RSI. The experimental results have been presented
on different RSI and are compared with recently developed
methods in terms of different quantitative parameters,
computational time and visual performance. Regardless of
the significant performance of the proposed framework, the
proposed method has some issues such as, not suitable for
RSI having low resolution, need better segmentation
method to enhance the efficacy of extraction. Further, the
centerline extracted by the proposed work is discontinued
at some places due to the shadow of trees and buildings.
This occlusion generates a difference in spectral properties
of land cover as a result road area is not considered as a
road network and road network is discontinuous at such
places. Also, the centerline extracted using the presented
method at junctions is not satisfactory due to variations in
distances of the path at the complex road junctions.
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