Semi-automatic extraction of rural roads under the constraint of combined geometric and texture features

Abstract

The extraction of road information from high-resolution remotely-sensed images has important application value in many fields. Rural roads have the characteristics of relatively narrow widths and diversified pavement materials; these characteristics can easily lead to problems involving the similarity of the road texture with the texture of surrounding objects and make it difficult to improve the automation of traditional high-precision road extraction methods. Based on this background, a semi-automatic rural road extraction method constrained by a combination of geometric and texture features is proposed in this paper. First, an adaptive road width extraction model is proposed to improve the accuracy of the initial road centre point. Then, aiming at the continuous change of curvature of rural roads, a tracking direction prediction model is proposed. Finally, a matching model under geometric texture constraints is proposed, which solves the problem of similarity between road and neighbourhood texture to a certain extent. The experimental results show that by selecting different types of experimental scenes or remotely sensed image data, compared with other methods, the proposed method can not only guarantee the road extraction accuracy but also improve the degree of automation to a certain extent.