A Hybrid Approach for Automatic Building Extraction from Multi-angular Optical Imagery

Turlapaty, A.C., Gokaraju, B., Du, Q., Younan, N. H., & Aanstoos, J.V. (2012). A Hybrid Approach for Automatic Building Extraction from Multi-angular Optical Imagery. Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing, IEEE Journal of. IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society (GRSS) and IEEE Committee on Earth Ob. 5(1), 89 - 100. DOI:10.1109/JSTARS.2011.2179792.

The advent of high resolution spaceborne images leads to the development of efficient detection of complex urban details with high precision. This urban land use study is focused on building extraction and height estimation from spaceborne optical imagery. The advantages of such methods include 3D visualization of urban areas, digital urban mapping, and GIS databases for decision makers. In particular, a hybrid approach is proposed for efficient building extraction from optical multi-angular imagery, where a template matching algorithm is formulated for automatic estimation of relative building height, and the relative height estimates are utilized in conjunction with a support vector machine (SVM)-based classifier for extraction of buildings from non-buildings. This approach is tested on orthorectified Level-2a multi-angular images of Rio de Janerio from WorldView-2 sensor. Its performance is validated using a 3-fold cross validation strategy. The final results are presented as a building map and an approximate 3D model of buildings. The building detection accuracy of the proposed method is improved to 88%, compared to 83% without using multi-angular information.