Road extraction from ETM panchromatic image based on Dual-Edge Following

Research on road extraction from digital imagery is motivated by the need for data acquisition and update for geographic information systems (GIS). Roads usually have parallelism of road sides, and on the images, especially the edge map, there are dual edges for each road. In this paper, we propose an approach for automatically extracting road from ETM panchromatic image with a resolution of 15 meters based on Dual-Edge Following. Our approach uses the edge detector with embedded confidence (EDEC, Peter Meer, 2001) to detect road edge, then traces road to generate road candidates by Dual-Edge Following, next exploits the perceptual organization based on probability to link the road segments. Dual-Ddge Following use edge information of both road sides to search for road segments which can improve the precision of road segments. The experiment with ETM panchromatic image in Xinjiang, China shows the validity of the approach.