Road junction extraction in high-resolution SAR images via morphological detection and shape identification

Abstract

Road junctions are important components of a road network. Therefore, if road junctions are identified accurately, the quality of road extraction can be improved. However, they are often neglected by most methods for road extraction. This letter presents a road junction extraction method with two stages. First, global detection is performed to find the centre positions of the road junction candidates by using morphological operators. Second, the shape of a road junction is identified based on a valley-finding algorithm. The proposed method is validated by airborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images of 1 m resolution. The results indicate that the proposed method has a higher recognition rate than two other methods and is robust to various interferences.

Acknowledgements

We thank all the reviewers for their valuable suggestions and comments. In addition, we acknowledge the patience and time of the editors for helping to improve the quality of this manuscript. This work is supported in part by the Foundation for the Author of National Excellent Doctoral Dissertation of China under Grant 201046 and the Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University under Grant NCET-10-0895.