The role of context for road extraction from SAR imagery

This paper deals with automatic road extraction from airborne SAR imagery. Automatic extracted road networks are often incomplete. Even sophisticated road extraction approaches that are developed for optical imagery often fail to extract a complete road network. In SAR imagery in contrary to optical imagery, roads are more affected by high backscattering context objects. These local context objects like trees, bridges, or vehicles can disturb road extraction, but they can also support it We show that an explicit modeling of context objects, leads to improved extraction results.