Automatic road extraction from satellite imagery using LEGION networks

We present an automatic method for road extraction from satellite imagery. The core of the proposed method is Locally Excitatory Globally Inhibitory Oscillator Networks (LEGION). We decompose the road extraction task into three stages. The first stage is image segmentation by LEGION. In the second stage, we compute the medial axis of each segment and select the segments with narrow widths. The third is the road grouping stage. With the medial axes, alignment-dependent connections between medial axis points are established and LEGION is utilized to group the well-aligned medial axes, which represent extracted road segments. Due to the selective gating mechanism of LEGION, different roads in an image are grouped separately. Experimental results on synthetic and real images show the effectiveness of this method.