This paper proposes a new approach for extraction of main roads from SAR imagery based on parallel pairs detection. The process is divided into three steps

in the low-level step

after the original SAR imagery is filtered to suppress the speckle noise

Ratio Of Exponentially Weighted Averages(ROEWA) operator is used to detect edge; in the mid-level step

eliminating short lines and linking roads firstly

then the approach of parallel pairs detection is carried out; in the high-level step

after linking the roads

we recognize the roads by the proposed model. Finally

the roads are grown according to the conditions. The experiment results show the feasibility of the approach.