Semi-automatic road centerline extraction in high-resolution SAR images based on circular template matching

摘要

Because of the disturb of trees along roads, buildings to cover, cars getting on the road an etc, it is difficult to automatically extract centerline of roads from high-resolution SAR images. This paper presents a new semi-automatic road centerline extraction method based on circular template matching. Firstly, circular template and the road orientation are calculated by user-given input two points. Secondly, center points are searched by matching the template against the image along the orientation of the road under consideration. Finally, the extracted center points are linked by quadratic curve fitting. Human interactions are needed when center points searching failed. SAR images with 1 meter resolution taken by airborne SAR were used in the experiment. And the results show that the centerline extraction method mentioned above is effective in high resolution SAR images.