RoadTracer: Automatic Extraction of Road Networks from Aerial Images

Favyen Bastani, Songtao He, Sofiane Abbar, Mohammad Alizadeh, Hari Balakrishnan, Sanjay Chawla, Sam Madden, David Dewitt

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

190 Scopus citations

Abstract

Mapping road networks is currently both expensive and labor-intensive. High-resolution aerial imagery provides a promising avenue to automatically infer a road network. Prior work uses convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to detect which pixels belong to a road (segmentation), and then uses complex post-processing heuristics to infer graph connectivity. We show that these segmentation methods have high error rates because noisy CNN outputs are difficult to correct. We propose RoadTracer, a new method to automatically construct accurate road network maps from aerial images. RoadTracer uses an iterative search process guided by a CNN-based decision function to derive the road network graph directly from the output of the CNN. We compare our approach with a segmentation method on fifteen cities, and find that at a 5% error rate, RoadTracer correctly captures 45% more junctions across these cities.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2018 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR 2018
PublisherIEEE Computer Society
Pages4720-4728
Number of pages9
ISBN (Electronic)9781538664209
DOIs
StatePublished - Dec 14 2018
Externally publishedYes
Event31st Meeting of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR 2018 - Salt Lake City, United States
Duration: Jun 18 2018Jun 22 2018

Publication series

NameProceedings of the IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
ISSN (Print)1063-6919

Conference

Conference31st Meeting of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR 2018
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySalt Lake City
Period06/18/1806/22/18

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