An automatic method for road centerline extraction from post-earthquake aerial images

• Main Authors: Zhumei Liu, Jingfa Zhang, Xue Li
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: KeAi Communications Co., Ltd. 2019-01-01
• Series: Geodesy and Geodynamics
• Online Access: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1674984718301101

Road vector database plays an important role in post-earthquake relief, rescue and reconstruction. However, due to data privacy policy, it is difficult for general users to obtain high-precision and complete vector data of road network. The OpenStreetMap (OSM) project provides an open-source, global free road dataset, but there are inevitable geo-localization/projection errors, which will lead to large errors in hazard survey analysis. In this paper, we proposed a road centerline correction method using post-earthquake aerial images. Under the constraint of the vector road map (OpenStreetMap), we rectified the centerline by the context feature and spectral gradient feature of post-event images automatically. The experiment implemented on 0.5 m/pixel post-event aerial images of Haiti, 2010, showed that the completeness and extraction quality of proposed method were over 90% and 80% without any manual intervention. Keywords: OpenStreetMap, Morphological gradient, Road centerline extraction, Aerial image