A general approach for extracting road vector data from raster maps

Raster maps are easily accessible and contain rich road information; however, converting the road information to vector format is challenging because of varying image quality, overlapping features, and typical lack of metadata (e.g., map geocoordinates). Previous road vectorization approaches for raster maps typically handle a specific map series and require significant user effort. In this paper, we present a general road vectorization approach that exploits common geometric properties of roads in maps for processing heterogeneous raster maps while requiring minimal user intervention. In our experiments, we compared our approach to a widely used commercial product using 40 raster maps from 11 sources. We showed that overall our approach generated high-quality results with low redundancy with considerably less user input compared with competing approaches.