Optimisation of building detection in satellite images by combining multispectral classification and texture filtering

Conventional multispectral classification methods show poor performance with respect to detection of urban object classes, such as buildings, in high spatial resolution satellite images. This is because objects in urban areas are very complicated with respect to both their spectral and spatial characteristics. Multispectral classification detects object classes only according to the spectral information of the individual pixels, while a large amount of spatial information is neglected. In this study, a technique is described which attempts to detect urban buildings in two stages. The first stage is a conventional multispectral classification. In the second stage, the classification of buildings is improved by means of their spatial information through a modified co-occurrence matrix based filtering. The direction dependence of the co-occurrence matrix is utilised in the filtering process. The method has been tested by using TM and SPOT Pan merged data for the whole area of the city of Shanghai, China. After the co-occurrence matrix based filtering, the average user accuracy increased by about 46% and the average Kappa statistic by about 57%. This result is about 26% better than the accuracy improvement through normal texture filtering. The method presented in this study is very useful for a rapid estimation of urban building and city development, especially in metropolitan areas of developing countries. q 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.