Road Network Extraction from Satellite Images using Morphological Operations

This paper proposes a technique for FPGA implementation of road detection on satellite images. Many Geographic Information System (GIS) activities such as GIS updating, geo-referencing and geospatial integration requires detection of road from satellite images. Hence extraction of roads from satellite image has grown in importance. A technique for road detection using edge detection and morphological operation and its FPGA implementation using Xilinx System Generator (XSG) has been proposed. Initially the image is preprocessed to remove unwanted noises. Then edges of the image are detected using sobel edge detector and the Euclidean distance between neighbor pixels in the edge map is computed. Then skeletonization is done on the edge map based on the distance function. To detect the road segments a double thersholding operation is performed. Finally the image is subject to post processing to obtain the binary road map.