line prunning after skelelton

Hi I am doing some road detection stuff with satellite imagery. So i have detected some roads, and i want to find its end points. So I have a binary image of road, i do bwmorph skel to get the skeleton of the road. But there small fraction of roads which i want to remove (see figure attached: I want to get from a to b

). So after skeleton how i can do something like remove road fragments whose lengths are less than lets say 20 pixels.

Image analyst, you have vast knowledge about image processing. Could you please guide me in right direction.

[Abinaya]

Sukuchha,Apologises for not answering your question. Instead I need help from u. Can you pls tell me how to detect curves..As you work on road detection... i think you may need to detect curves in the road. I have learnt that Hough transform is not sufficient to detect curves.. will you kindly tell me what concept you applied for detecting curves.???

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

http://www.mathworks.com/help/images/ref/bwmorph.html with 'spur' option.

[Sukuchha]

Thanks of answering walter. I have tried spur option but problem with that it also tends to shorten lines which are along the main branch and i dont want that. Any idea to overcome it ?

[Image Analyst]

It's not obvious, in a fully automatic setting, what you consider to be the "main" branch, for example in the lower right, why do those two branches remain while others are removed? You might have to look at connection angle or something.