Road extraction from aerial images using a region competition algorithm

In this paper, we present a user-guided method based on the region competition algorithm to extract roads, and therefore we also provide some clues concerning the placement of the points required by the algorithm. The initial points are analyzed in order to find out whether it is necessary to add more initial points, and this process will be based on image information. Not only is the algorithm able to obtain the road centerline, but it also recovers the road sides. An initial simple model is deformed by using region growing techniques to obtain a rough road approximation. This model will be refined by region competition. The result of this approach is that it delivers the simplest output vector information, fully recovering the road details as they are on the image, without performing any kind of symbolization. Therefore, we tried to refine a general road model by using a reliable method to detect transitions between regions. This method is proposed in order to obtain information for feeding large-scale Geographic Information System.