Automatic building footprint extraction from high-resolution satellite image using mathematical morphology

Abstract

Automatic building extraction from High-Resolution Satellite (HRS) image has been an important field of research in the area of remote sensing. Different techniques related to radiometric, geometric, edge detection and object based have already been discussed and used by various researchers for building extraction. However, faithfulness of extraction is highly dependent on user intervention. This study proposes a novel morphological based automatic approach for extraction of buildings using HRS image. Moreover, using such an automatic approach, buildings can be detected having different size and shape. The proposed technique integrates morphological Top-hat filter, and K-means algorithm to extract buildings having bright and dark rooftops. Further, extracted bright and dark rooftop building segments have been combined together to obtain the final output that contains final extracted building segments. In order to eliminate false-detected buildings, different parameters like area, eccentricity, and axis ratio (major/minor axis) have been used. The suitability of the technique has been judged using different indicators such as completeness, correctness and quality.

Keywords

• Mathematical morphology
• Top-hat transformation
• K-means algorithm
• candidate building segment
• connected component