An Integrated Framework for Road Detection in Dense Urban Area from High-Resolution Satellite Imagery and Lidar Data

Abstract

Automatic road detection, in dense urban areas, is a challenging application in the remote sensing community. This is mainly because of physical and geometrical variations of road pixels, their spectral similarity to other features such as buildings, parking lots and sidewalks, and the obstruction by vehicles and trees. These problems are real obstacles in precise detection and identification of urban roads from high-resolution satellite imagery. One of the promising strategies to deal with this problem is using multi-sensors data to reduce the uncertainties of detection. In this paper, an integrated object-based analysis framework was developed for detecting and extracting various types of urban roads from high-resolution optical images and Lidar data. The proposed method is designed and implemented using a rule-oriented approach based on a masking strategy. The overall accuracy (OA) of the final road map was 89.2%, and the kappa coefficient of agreement was 0.83, which show the efficiency and performance of the method in different conditions and interclass noises. The results also demonstrate the high capability of this object-based method in simultaneous identification of a wide variety of road elements in complex urban areas using both high-resolution satellite images and Lidar data.