EuroSDR Projects - Host Ireland

have developed semi-automated tools for building extraction and other firms too, could very well
offer similar tools for roads. Thus, the central ideas of the proposed working group are:
• To survey the data specification needs of important data producers, mainly NMCAs, and their
customers.
• To thoroughly evaluate the current status of research (including models, strategies, methods and
used data), to test and compare existing semi- or fully automated methods using various data sets
and high quality reference data, to identify weak points and, finally, to propose strategies and
methods that lead to a fast implementation of operational procedures for road extraction, update,
and refinement. Here, refinement means the improvement of planimetric accuracy, but also the
addition of new information such as height and road attributes. (Originally, we intended to focus
on update and refinement. However, we got almost no feedback on these issues and thus decided
to limit the scope to road extraction.)
1.2 Implementation
A EuroSDR working group (WG) chaired by Helmut Mayer, Bundeswehr University (UniBw)
München, and Emmanuel Baltsavias, ETH Zürich, was formed in 2002. It has now significantly
exceeded its proposed life-time of one and a half to two years. Actions so far comprise:
• Establishment of a web-page. The WG was officially announced and presented (kick-off) at the
workshop "Incremental Updating", October 2002, Frankfurt, Germany.
• The distribution of the two extensive questionnaires to Researchers and Manufacturers as well as
Data Producers was done at the end of the year 2002
• In spite of considerable advertising efforts the response to the questionnaire for Data Producers
was as low as one reply. For the Researchers and Manufacturers the feedback was better with ten
replies, though none from industry. Because of the weak response from the side of the producers
and because the reply from the researchers pointed mostly to an interest in a comparison of the
results of the individual approaches on the same data sets, we decided to postpone the reporting of
the outcome of the questionnaires to this report. Instead, we focused on generating data sets
consisting of images together with ground truth and the preparation of software making it possible
to evaluate the individual results based on quantitative evaluation criteria.
• Preparation and distribution of test data sets including documentation took much longer than
expected, particularly as we wanted to include Leica ADS 40 digital aerial image data, which was
only delivered in the middle of 2004. Data has kindly been provided by Swiss Federal Office of
Topography, Bern, Switzerland, Leica Geosystems, Heerbrugg, Switzerland, and the Bundeswehr
Geoinformation Office (AGeoBw), Euskirchen, Germany. The data was distributed following the
ISPRS Istanbul congress in July 2004.
• Some first results were submitted and evaluated by the end of 2004. By mid 2005 the situation was
very disappointing, however, more results were received by the end of 2005 and the beginning of
2006.
We are finally in a position to give a meaningful account of the results. Unfortunately, due to the long
duration of the WG many things including the scientific focus of the WG chair and the availability of
personnel working on road extraction has changed. Thus, we are not in a position to give a broad
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