Characterising Elements of Urban Morphology From
High Resolution Optical Remote Sensing Images
B. K. Mohan # and J.Hogg *
# Centre of Studies in Resources Engineering
Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay
Powai, Mumbai 400076, India
* School of Geography
University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK
ABSTRACT
Research into ways of characterising or inferring elements of urban morphology by
image analysis of high spatial resolution images from earth-observing satellites shows promise.
Road networks form an important component of urban morphology and have been a focus of
research in image analysis of cities. Automatic identification of road networks without user
intervention and ancillary data like recent maps, however, has not been very successful so far, due
to variations in surface illumination, width, surface material, etc. In other words, the local spectral
and geometric characteristics of roads are not sufficiently distinctive to separate them from
background structures. This paper endeavors to develop a method for the detection of roads in
urban scenes of high resolution satellite imagery based on a multiscale feature tracking version of
derivative-of-Gaussian based line detector.
