IKONOS satellite imagery and its use in automated road extraction

In September 1999, the first commercial high-resolution imaging satellite, IKONOS II, was successfully launched. With its high geometric accuracy and nominal 1-m ground sample distance, the imagery from IKONOS is particularly suitable for mapping. As high-resolution imagery from this satellite and others that follow becomes widely available, the need for algorithms that support the extraction of man-made objects in an automated manner will increase. This paper has two parts. In the first section, properties of imagery from IKONOS are described. These include the spectral response of the sensor, the radiometric calibration coefficients, and image geometry. The second part of the paper describes work in automated road extraction from IKONOS to illustrate methods that exploit the characteristics of the imagery.