Road Extraction From Satellite Images Using Particle Filtering and Extended Kalman Filtering

Abstract

Extended Kalman filter (EKF) has previously been employed to extract road maps in satellite images. This filter traces a single road until a stopping criterion is satisfied. In our new approach, we have combined EKF with a special particle filter (PF) in order to regain the trace of the road beyond obstacles, as well as to find and follow different road branches after reaching to a road junction. In this approach, first, EKF traces a road until a stopping criterion is met. Then, instead of terminating the process, the results are passed to the PF algorithm which tries to find the continuation of the road after a possible obstacle or to identify all possible road branches that might exist on the other side of a road junction. For further improvement, we have modified the procedure for obtaining the measurements by decoupling this process from the current state prediction of the filter. Removing the dependence of the measurement data to the predicted state reduces the potential for instability of the road-tracing algorithm. Furthermore, we have constructed a method for dynamic clustering of the road profiles in order to maintain tracking when the road profile undergoes some variations due to changes in the road width and intensity.