Automatic urban road extraction on DSM data based on fuzzy ART, region growing, morphological operations and Radon transform

In recent years, an automatic urban road extraction, as part of Intelligent Transportation research, has attracted the researchers due to the important role for the next modern transportation where urban area plays the main role within the transportation system. In this work, we propose a new combination of fuzzy ART clustering, Region growing, Morphological Operations and Radon transform (ARMOR) for automatic extraction of urban road networks from the digital surface model (DSM). The DSM data, which is based-on the elevation of surface, overcome a serious building's shadow problem as in the aerial photo image. Due to the different elevation between the road and the buildings, the thresholding technique yields a fast initial road extraction. The threshold values are obtained from Fuzzy ART clustering of the geometrical points in the histogram. The initial road is then expanded using region growing. Though most of the road regions are extracted, it contains a lot of non-road areas and the edge is still rough. A fast way to smoothing the region is by employing the morphology closing operation. Furthermore, we perform the road line filter by opening operation with a line shape structuring element, where the line orientation is obtained from the Radon Transform. Finally, the road network is constructed based-on B-Spline from the extracted road skeleton. The experimental result shows that the proposed method running faster and increases the quality and the accuracy about 10% higher than the highest result of the compared method.