Extraction and removal of layers from map imagery data

Map images are composed of semantic layers depicted in arbitrary color. Layer extraction and removal is often needed for improving readability as well as for further processing. When image is separated into the set of layers with respect to the colors, it results in appearance of severe artifacts because of the layer overlapping. In this way the extracted layers differ from the semantic data, which affects further map image processing analysis tasks. In this work, we introduce techniques for extraction and removal of the semantic layers from the map images. The techniques utilize low-complexity morphological image restoration algorithms. The restoration provides good quality of the reconstructed layers, and alleviates the affect of artifacts on the precision of image analysis tasks.