Road Centerline Vectorization of High Resolution Images By Multi-Criteria Analysis Using Ordered Weighted Averaging Operators in Road Network Graph Model

Nowadays, extraction of roads from digital aerial and satellite images is a common method of road database construction. Regarding to massive amount of road data and time and cost effective updating requirements, automation procedure is becoming an essential. In this research, which is mostly concentrated on road vectorization process, an automatic approach of road centerline vectorization from detected road image with negligible operator interventions is designed. The proposed system consists of two main stages including road key points determination and connection. At the first stage, the road key points representative of the road centerline are determined using particle swarm optimization clustering. At the second stage, in order to model the road networks weighted graph theory is considered. In this model cost of each connection is calculated by aggregating appropriate road geometric criteria by means of ordered weighted averaging operators. The least cost connections constitute the vectorized road networks. The proposed approach was implemented on several high resolution satellite images and their results were compared with the results of the minimum spanning tree algorithm. On the whole, the obtaining results proved the efficiency of the vectorization approach in attaining the complete and accurate road network.
Extracting different road shapes including direct and curved roads, roads with different widths, parallel roads with different distances, junctions and square with average RMSE value about 0.9 meter, average completeness of %94, and average correctness greater than %95 proves the efficiency of the algorithm in yielding complete road networks.