Morphological road segmentation in urban areas from high resolution satellite images

High resolution satellite images provided by the last generation sensors significantly increased the potential of almost all the image information mining (IIM) applications related to earth observation. This is especially true for the extraction of road information, task of primary interest for many remote sensing applications, which scope is more and more extended to complex urban scenarios thanks to the availability of highly detailed images. This context is particularly challenging due to such factors as the variability of road visual appearence and the occlusions from entities like trees, cars and shadows. On the other hand, the peculiar geometry and morphology of man-made structures, particularly relevant in urban areas, is enhanced in high resolution images, making this kind of information especially useful for road detection. In this work, we provide a new insight on the use of morphological image analysis for road extraction in complex urban scenarios, and propose a technique for road segmentation that only relies on this domain. The keypoint of the technique is the use of skeletons as powerful descriptors for road objects: the proposed method is based on an ad-hoc skeletonization procedure that enhances the linear structure of road segments, and extracts road objects by first detecting their skeletons and then associating each of them with a region of the image. Experimental results are presented on two different high resolution satellite images of urban areas.