Road Extraction and Network Building from Synthetic Aperture Radar Images using A-Priori Information

This paper describes a method for the extraction of road networks from radar images. Three phases can be distinguished: (1) detection of road lines, (2) network building, and (3) network fusion. The method has been demonstrated on two radar images, one urban and one rural. Despite the differences, the procedure was able to cover a large part of both networks that was not obscured by trees. This was done using roughly the same parameters. Topology was preserved, and one of the networks was fused with a network from a 1: 50,000 digital map, and one extracted from a high-resolution optical image. However, the network extraction and merging process described in this paper can not be regarded as optimal. Additional rules and processing are required. Useful input is expected from image analysts with respect to the procedure and results.