Automatic Extraction of the Non-Urban Roads from Satellite Images using Artificial Neural Network

Road detection from the satellite images can be considered as a classification process in which pixels are divided into the road and non-road classes. In this research, an automatic road extraction using an artificial neural network (ANN) based on automatic information extraction from satellite images and self-adjusting of the hidden layer proposed. Parameters of non-urban road networks from satellite images using a histogram-based binary image segmentation technique are also presented. The segmentation method is implemented by determining a global threshold, which is obtained from a statistical analysis of a number of sample satellite images and their ground truths. The thresholding method is based on two major facts: first, the points corresponding to non-asphalt roads are brighter than other areas in non-urban images. Second, it is observed that in an aerial image, the area covered by roads is only a small fraction of total pixels. It is also observed that pixels corresponding to roads are generally populated at the very bright end of the image greyscale histogram. In this method, at first, the possible road pixels are selected by the proposed segmentation method. Then different parameters, including color, gradient, and entropy, are computed for each pixel from the source image. Finally, these features are used for the artificial neural network input. The results show that the accuracy of the proposed road extraction method is around 80%.