Abstract: For automatic recognition of residential areas filled with hatched lines in color scanned topographical maps,Gabor filters are firstly used to detect hatched lines with their texture features and find the candidate residential areas.Then in these candidate areas,the contours of residential areas are extracted by employing the curve tracking algorithm.Next,linear interpolation and geometrical emendation are utilized respectively to solve the problem of unclosed residential areas and arrange the residential areas along the same road in order.Finally,experimental results on five representative samples demonstrate the validity and applicability of the proposed method.