Automatic identification and extraction of forest road through advanced LoG matching techniques

An automatic algorithm for forest road identification and extraction was developed. The algorithm utilized Laplacian of Gaussian (LoG) filter and slope calculation on high resolution multispectral imagery and LiDAR data respectively to extract both primary road and secondary road segments in the forest area. Also, a hierarchical post process was designed to iteratively connect the road segments to form the final road map. The process was tested on Hearst forest, located in central Ontario, Canada. Based on visual examination against manual digitized roads, all the roads from the test area have been identified and extracted from the process‥