Evaluating Automatic Road Detection across a Large Aerial Imagery Collection

The automated extraction of roads from aerial imagery can be of value for tasks including mapping, surveillance and change detection. Unfortunately, there are no public databases or standard evaluation protocols for evaluating these techniques. Many techniques are further hindered by a reliance on manual initialisation, making large scale application of the techniques impractical. In this paper, we present a public database and evaluation protocol for the evaluation of road extraction algorithms, and propose an improved automatic seed finding technique to initialise road extraction, based on a combination of geometric and colour features.