L-shaped Corner Detector for Rooftop Extraction from Satellite/Aerial Imagery

摘要

Rooftop extraction from satellite/aerial imagery is an important geospatial problem with many practical applications. However, rooftop extraction remains a challenging problem due to the diverse characteristics and appearances of the buildings, as well as the quality of the satellite/aerial images. Many existing rooftop extraction methods use rooftop corners as a basic component. Nonetheless, existing rooftop corner detectors either suffer from high missed detection or introduce high false alarm. Based on the observation that rooftop corners are typically of L-shape, we propose an L-shaped corner detector for automatic rooftop extraction from high resolution satellite/ aerial imagery. The proposed detector considers information in a spatial circle around each pixel to construct a feature map which captures the probability of L-shaped corner at every pixel. Our exper-imental results on a rooftop database of over 200 buildings demonstrate its effectiveness for detecting rooftop corners. Furthermore, our proposed detector is complementary to many existing rooftop extraction approaches which require reliable rooftop corners as their inputs. For instance, it can be used in the quadrilateral footprint extraction methods or in driving level-set-based segmentation techniques.