Road Network Extraction from SAR Images with the Support of Angular Texture Signature and POIs

Urban road network information is an important part of modern spatial information infrastructure and is crucial for high-precision navigation map production and unmanned driving. Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is a widely used remote-sensing data source, but the complex structure of road networks and the noises in images make it very difficult to extract road information through SAR images. We developed a new method of extracting road network information from SAR images by considering angular (A) and texture (T) features in the sliding windows and points of interest (POIs, or P), and we named this method ATP-ROAD. ATP-ROAD is a sliding window-based semi-automatic approach that uses the grayscale mean, grayscale variance, and binary segmentation information of SAR images as texture features in each sliding window. Since POIs have much-duplicated information, this study also eliminates duplicated POIs considering distance and then selects a combination of POI linkages by discerning the direction of these POIs to initially determine the road direction. The ATP-ROAD method was applied to three experimental areas in Shanghai to extract the road network using China’s Gaofen-3 imagery. The experimental results show that the extracted road network information is relatively complete and matches the actual road conditions, and the result accuracy is high in the three different regions, i.e., 89.57% for Area-I, 96.88% for Area-II, and 92.65% for Area-III. Our method together with our extraction software can be applied to extract information about road networks from SAR images, providing an alternative for enriching the variety of road information.