Automatic extraction of road intersections from raster maps

Numerous raster maps are available on the Internet, but the geographic coordinates of the maps are often unknown. In order to determine the precise location of a raster map, we exploit the fact that the layout of the road intersections within a certain area can be used to determine the map's location. In this paper, we describe an approach to automatically extract road intersections from arbitrary raster maps. Identifying the road intersections is difficult because raster maps typically contain multiple layers that represent roads, buildings, symbols, street names, or even contour lines, and the road layer needs to be automatically separated from other layers before road intersections can be extracted. We combine a variety of image processing and graphics recognition methods to automatically eliminate the other layers and then extract the road intersection points. During the extraction process, we determine the intersection connectivity (i.e., number of roads that meet at an inte...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: GIS
• Authors: Yao-Yi Chiang, Craig A. Knoblock, Ching-Chien Chen
• Keywords: Database, GIS 2005, Raster Maps, Road Intersection Extraction, Road Intersections