Road centreline extraction from classified images by using the geodesic method

This study presents an automatic method for accurate road centreline extraction from classified images. Unlike earlier methods that have mainly relied on the thinning algorithm, the proposed automatic method selects end points from a classified image and then connects them using the geodesic method to formulate the road network. As the proposed method generates the road centreline by tracing along the ridge line of the optimally oriented flux (OOF) measure, this method is able to eliminate undesired spurs while retaining the correct road network topology. Three test images are used to quantitatively evaluate the proposed method. Experiments show that the proposed method yields a substantial improvement over the thinning algorithm.