Extract different types of roads based on mathematical morphology

Road information is an important data source of basic geographic database. Research on intelligent, automated road extraction is significant for studies on identification and location of objects from remote sensing image, mass GIS data acquisition and the update of electronic maps and spatial databases. Mathematical morphology (MM) developed since 1960s can simplify image structure, keep image features, remove redundant structure, and its operations are simple, flexible and fast. In this paper, roads are classified into four kinds: linear road, curvilinear road, crossing road, breakage road, based on MM strategy, combination with image threshold segment method, four road extraction strategies were proposed, experiments proved that these four kinds road can be well extracted.