Automatic extraction of roads from aerial images based on scale space and snakes

We propose a new approach for automatic road extraction from aerial imagery with a model and a strategy mainly based on the multi-scale detection of r oads in combination with geometry-constrained edge extraction using snakes. A main advantage of our approach is, that it allows for the first time a b ridging of shadows and partially occluded areas using the heavily disturbed evidence in the image. Additionally, it has only few parameters to be adju sted. The road network is constructed after extracting crossings with varyi ng shape and topology. We show the feasibility of the approach not only by presenting reasonable results but also by evaluating them quantitatively ba sed on ground truth.