Within topographic databases, traffic islands constitute important features of mapped road networks. However, they are generally not explicitly modelled in most approaches to road extraction from aerial imagery. Traffic islands can be considered as elements of road junctions and in this paper an active contour-based approach for their automatic extraction is proposed. The road junction outline and vector data is first provided so attention can be focussed on specific locations. Constraints are then introduced to distinguish traffic islands from other features such as cars. Following a review of the active contour model adopted, and a description of the traffic island extraction approach, an account is given of experimental testing of the developed method. The testing utilised aerial images of 0.1 m ground resolution, over both suburban and rural areas. Experimental results are presented and prospects for the new approach are discussed.