Maps are one of the most complicated types of drawings. Drawing recognition technology is not yet sophisticated enough for automated map reading. To automatically extract a road map dircetly from complicated topographical maps, a very sophisticated algorithm is needed, since the image generally involvfes such complicated patterns as symbols, characters, residential sections, rivers, railroads, etc. This paper proposes a new feature extraction method based on the morphology. We apply this method to extract complete set of road segments from topographical maps. The proposed method successfully extract road segments from various areas.