Road interchanges are a major pattern type in road networks. Recognition of road interchanges benefits automated road network generalization, car navigation and traffic flow analysis. This study first investigated several existing approaches to automatically detecting interchanges in a road network, and determined that the recognition of characteristic road intersections is essential for the effective detection of interchanges. Several experiments were carried out to investigate nine types of road intersections for interchange detection and to analyze characteristic ones. Furthermore, an approach to the detection of both intersections and segments of interchanges was proposed and validated. The road networks across different scales were tested and results show that: (1) the T‐shaped and Cross‐shaped junctions are very common in road networks, but they are not the most characteristic ones for interchange detection; (2) the y‐shaped, Y‐shaped types, X‐shaped, Fork‐shaped and Multi‐leg may be the characteristic types for interchange detection; (3) the proposed approach to detecting interchanges is effective, and most of the intersections and segments of interchanges can be detected. In addition, taking multiple characteristic types into consideration for interchange detection is suggested.