A rule based approach for detecting bridges from high resolution electro-optic satellite images

In this study, an automatic and rule based approach which extracts bridges over water in satellite images is developed. To find the bridges in the image, possible water regions are first found using thresholding and clustering methods. Candidate bridge regions are then extracted by applying morphological operations to the water mask. Also the algorithm proposes an optional verification step that uses geometric constraints and orientation information to increase precision values. The proposed algorithm is tested on different satellite images and the quantitative and visual results that were obtained showed that the algorithm is effective on extracting bridges of different sizes.