An Approach for Road Extraction from High Resolution Imagery Based on Radon-Like Features and Mathematical Morphology

S. Natarajan1, P. N. Anil2
1

Dept. of Information Science, PES Institute of Technology, Bangalore, Karnataka, INDIA

2

Dept. of Mathematics, Global Academy of Technology, Bangalore, Karnataka, INDIA

Abstract - Road Extraction from high resolution imagery is of fundamental importance in the context of spatial data capturing and updating for GIS applications. In this paper we present a new approach for extracting roads from high resolution imagery using Radon-like features and mathematical morphology. In this approach first image is preprocessed using bilateral filter and then Radon-like features are used to enhance the road edges. Finally roads are extracted using morphological operations. The method is successfully implemented using high resolution satellite and areal imagery. Keywords: Bilateral filtering. Radon-like Mathematical Morphology, Road extraction features,

1 Introduction
Road extraction from remotely sensed data is a challenging issue in the field of photogrammetry and digital image processing. Extensive research has been done on road extraction from aerial and satellite imagery. The methods for road extraction can be mainly divided in to two types, semi-automatic method and fully automatic method. Semi-automatic feature extraction is an interactive process between an operator and computer algorithms. In such methods an operator selects initial point(s) and a direction for road tracking algorithm. Reference [1] proposed a semi automatic road network extraction method based on dynamic programming. Reference [2] proposed a semi-automatic method for urban road extraction based on level set method by using data fusion of multispectral and microwave radar images. In their paper the fast marching method of level set (LS-FM) is used as a tool to fuse different image features for road extraction. Reference [3] proposed a semi automatic road extraction algorithm using template matching. In this method user needs to input an initial seed point to extract

a road. Then the orientation of road seed is calculated automatically. They pointed out the method may not work on the roads casted by shadows. Reference [4] proposed a semi automatic road extraction method using multi spectral high resolution satellite images. Firstly, road mask was created by multi spectral data classification. Chains of edge pixels were tracked based on local edge direction and straight lines were obtained. Template matching was then used to determine the direction of the line and to obtain next road node. A result in urban area was good for major roads whereas small roads were missed, as road boundaries were unclear due to the objects surrounding the roads. Reference [5] proposed a semiautomatic method for extracting roads from high resolution (1 meter) pan sharpened multispectral IKONOS imagery. In their method an operator provides an initial seed point on the road of interest, then the region is extracted using level set method. The new framework for semi-automatic feature extraction was proposed in [6] and applied to highway extraction and vehicle detection from multiple frame aerial photographs. The basis of new framework proposed in their work is a geometric deformable model. Reference [7] proposed a method to extract the street network as surface elements from topologically correct graph using multi-resolution snakes. Automatic feature extraction has been always an interesting subject for researchers. In the recent years the automated extraction of roads has drawn considerable attention due to the need for the efficient acquisition and updating of road data for geodatabases. Reference [8] presents an automatic approach for the extraction of roads from high resolution multispectral satellite imagery. Lines are extracted in all image channels and employed as initial road hypothesis as well as for the generation of training areas. The goal is to calculate membership value for the road class pixel. The assessment of road hypotheses is done based on geometrical and spectral properties by finding fuzzy values for the parameters length, average width and road energy. Road network is generated using weighted graph and detour factor to close small and large gaps respectively. Reference [9] proposed an automated image processing technique to extract control points for

high spatial resolution satellite images which consists of two parts : Road extraction and Spot of road intersection searching. Reference [10] proposed a method for extraction of main roads in SPOT panchromatic images. The method consists of three steps: feature extraction, fuzzy modeling and mathematical morphology. Reference [11] proposed the automatic extraction of roads based on area and road characteristics. In this research using high resolution data existing roads are extracted from the image and unwanted vegetation information is removed using NDVI values. Reference [12] proposed an algorithm to detect road network from high resolution image using combination of a developed fuzzy system and mathematical morphology. The algorithm in the mathematical morphology stage is based on the assumption that road network forms an elongated area which can be extracted as the connected components with certain criteria. Reference [13] developed a method in order to extract and characterize the road network form high resolution satellite images. The algorithm is divided into two modules: a topologically correct graph of road network is first extracted and roads are then extracted as surface elements. Reference [14] presents a novel methodology for fully automated road centerline extraction, that exploits spectral content from high resolution multispectral images. Preliminary detection of candidate road centerline components is performed with Anti-parallel-edge Centerline Extraction (ACE). This is followed by constructing a road vector topology with a fuzzy grouping model that links nodes from a selforganized mapping of the ACE components. In this paper we present a new approach for road extraction using radon like features and mathematical morphology. In the next section we describe the methodology and also discuss the results from the implementation of proposed technique using high resolution imagery.

noise but preserves sharp edges by systematically looping through each pixel and adjusting weights to the adjacent pixels accordingly [15]. The following figure 1 original test image used for validating the proposed approach and figure 2 is the result of bilateral filtering applied to original test image.

Fig. 1 Original test image - 1

2 Methodology
The proposed framework for road extraction consists of following steps. In the first step the image is preprocessed using bilateral filter, in the second step we use RadonLike features for image enhancement and segmentation and finally step morphological operations are used to extract roads.

Fig. 2. Bilateral filtering result

2.2 Image Segmentation

Image segmentation is an essential and critical step in image processing. Image segmentation methods divide the image in to regions of coherent properties in an attempt to identify objects and their parts without the use of model of the object. Many image segmentation techniques are available in the literature. A review on image segmentation methods can be found in [16], [17]. A color image segmentation method based on fusion between edge pixels and region-growing images is presented in [18]. Image segmentation based on wavelets can be found in [19], [20]. Texture based image segmentation techniques are described in the literature [21] - [23]. Image segmentation methods based on Markov Random Field (MRF) are presented in [24] - [27]. Image segmentation based region growing and merging techniques can be found in [28], [29].

2.1 Preprocessing
The aim of image preprocessing is to reduce background noise. In this paper bilateral filtering is used for preprocessing. A bilateral filter is an edge-preserving and noise reducing smoothing filter. The intensity value at each pixel in an image is replaced by a weighted average of intensity values from nearby pixels. This weight is based on a Gaussian distribution. Crucially the weights depend not only on Euclidean distance but also on the radiometric differences. This not only reduce background

In this paper we make use of radon like features proposed by [30] for image segmentation. The Radon Transformation is a fundamental tool which is used in various applications such as radar imaging, geophysical imaging, nondestructive testing and medical imaging [31]. Radon transform is typically a mapping f ( x, y ) with ( x, y ) R2 to a function Rf ( p, ) with p R and [0 , ) , defined by

Rf ( p,) = f (x, y) (xcos + ysin p)dxdy (1)

where p is the perpendicular distance of the line from the origin and is the angle of incidence of the line (fig 3).

where T is the any desired function called extraction function. It can be noted that information derived along l need not be the same as l is traversed in two opposite directions. By associating direction to each line more flexibility can be built into these features, which can be implemented by associating with each l an angle (0, 2 ) whose tangent gives its slope and the important point being the angle is considered to be different than + . The output of above feature detection scheme is another image I ' ( x, y ) , when the angle of l is fixed and intercept varies, which is of the same size as input image I ( x, y ) . This is the significant point where this scheme differs from original Radon transform where the output in such case is a 1D function. The usefulness of the features described above depends on two critical choices the knots and the extraction function. One way to fix knots is, as a line scans through the input image, its intersection with the input images edge map define the knots and line segments. In this paper the knots for Radon-Like features are defined using an edge map of R(x,y) which is given by

R( x, y ) = max G ( , ) I ( x, y ) ,
,

(3)

Fig. 3 The Radon Transform computation The Radon back projection, inverse of the above described transform is used to reconstruct the original image. The image reconstruction algorithm has following steps [32]. Step 1: Acquisition of three different projections. Step 2: Expansion of the 1D projection in 2D projection maps. Step 3: Padding (with black) of the 2D projections maps in order not to loose information due to the next step. Step 4: Rotation of the maps to the correct angle. Step 5: Normalization of each map to the range 0 to 1. Step 6: Reconstruction of the original image by multiplying the maps pixel by pixel. Step 7: Post-processing of the reconstructed image by normalization and cropping to the required size. In this paper we use a new class of features called Radon-Like features proposed by [30], which retains the central idea of Radon transform i.e. processing an image I ( x, y ) along a line l parameterized by l (t ) = ( x(t ), y (t )) . In this technique instead of collapsing I ( x, y ) along l into scalar value via integration, some desired information derived from I ( x, y ) are distributed among various line segments along l . The line segments are defined by a set of salient points, called knots, along l . If the set of knots along l is given as (t1 , t 2 ,......, t n ) , value of Radon-Like feature at a point Q along l between ( x(t i ), y (t i )) and ( x(t i +1 ), y (t i +1 )) is given by

where G ( , ) is Gaussian-Second-Derivative (GSD) filter and the extraction function T is given by

t i +1

T ( I , l ( t )) =

ti

R ( l ( t )) t

|| l ( t i + 1 ) l ( t i ) || 2

, t [ t i , t i + 1 ] , (4)

where l is the line along which features are obtained. This extraction function assigns all the pixels between the knots t i and t i +1 along l the mean value of function R along l between the same two knots. In our approach knots are derived using Canny filter based edge detection with threshold set to 0.17. The segmented image is shown in figure 4.

Fig. 4 Radon-Like features

(q, l, ti , ti+1 )[I (x, y)] = T (I , l(t)),t [ti , ti+1 ]

(2)

3 Road Extraction using Mathematical Morphology

Once the Radon-Like features are extracted we use morphological operations to extract road or road networks. First to get improvement in quality of extracted feature, the image is first converted to binary image. The choice of threshold was based on the analysis of histogram of the image. Figure 5 shows the result of this step.

Fig. 7. Subtraction
Now the operation bwareaopen with threshold 1000 is applied. Figure 8 shows the extracted road and the figure 9 shows the extracted road (red) superimposed on the original image.

Fig.5. Binarized image Figure 5 shows the image with only two shades of gray (black and white) and now it is possible to implement other operations to remove the noise surrounding the feature of interest. The operation bwareaopen with threshold 300 is applied followed by operation imclose with structuring element disk. Figure 6 shows the implementation of the above operations. Fig.8. Extracted road

Fig. 6. Result of areaopen and imclose Fig. 9. Extracted road (red) superimposed on original test image In the next step operation imfill is applied to fill the holes followed by imsubstract with the image obtained in figure 6 is applied. Figure 7 shows result of this operation. Application of above methodology on two more test images is shown in figures (10) and (11). It is observed that most of the roads are correctly extracted, but the roads casted by shadows are not completely extracted (which can be seen in figure (11)).

(a)

(b)

Fig.10. (a) Test image -2 (b) extracted road network(red) superimposed on original test image-2.

(a)

(b)

Fig. 11. (a) Test image -3 (b) extracted road network(red) superimposed on original test image-3.

4 Analysis of proposed approach

The proposed method is validated by finding extraction rate, which is expressed as:

[4]

Extraction Rate =

CE X100 (CE + PE + NE)

(5)

[5]

where CE is the number of roads correctly extracted, PE is the number of roads partially extracted and NE is the number of roads not extracted. The following tables show the extraction rate for the proposed approach. TABLE 1 Extraction rate for three test images Test image -1 CE PE NE Extraction Rate 5 1 0 83.33 Test image - 2 15 1 2 83.33 Test image - 3 9 2 0 81.81

[6]

[7]

[8]

[9]

5 Conclusions
In this paper we presented an approach for extracting roads from high resolution imageries. In the preprocessing stage bilateral filtering is used to reduce the noise without affecting the edges. Radon-Like features are used in the next step to enhance the edge boundaries and segment the image. Traditionally Hough transform is used for edge or line detection, but the use of Hough transform is a very delicate matter when the image is noisy and hence Radon transform is preferred to detect lines, because it attenuates the noise through summation. In the final step a set of morphological operations are used to extract roads from the images.

[10]

[11]

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