An Approach for Automatic Building Extraction from High Resoluiıon Satellite Images Using Shadow Analysis and Active Contours Model

Abstract

Building extraction is an important task for detecting the changes of buildings, detecting the destroyed buildings, updating the vector maps as well as reconstructing 3D building models. Satellite and airborne images are greatly used for this purpose in various integrated forms. In this study, a novel approach is presented for automatic extraction of buildings from high resolution multispectral space imagery. The main goal of the study was to develop an automatic method for building extraction by utilizing the relationship between the cast shadows and the buildings with various types, shapes, sizes, heights and environmental scenes. If the characteristics of the shadow areas and the buildings that cast them are considered it can be seen that the geometry of the shadows highly depends on the geometry of buildings that share a border with their cast shadows. Therefore, the developed method has been developed with regard to meaningful relations between the buildings and their cast shadows.