A tracking algorithm for road extraction in dense urban areas: importance of contextual information

Inhalt:
This paper is concerned with the topic of road extraction in urban areas with high resolution SAR images. One major difficulty of this problem in urban areas comes from a high density of bright objects which often induces the road extraction process to fail in very disturbed parts of the scene. In this paper we propose an extension of a road tracking algorithm, yet presented in previous work, that takes into account not only radiometric information of road but also contextual information of this one. Thus layover of buildings are extracted thanks to an appropriate detector and then used in a tracking process to complete the road extraction results of an initial extraction method based on radiometric information.