Towards the Automatic Interpretation of Images for Gis Update

The automatic interpretation of aerial and satellite imagery is one of the main research tasks in photogrammetry and related disciplines. The primary goal is the automatic extraction of visible, spatial, topographic objects from imagery. The extracted objects are one possible input for updating or creating geographic data bases. In order to simplify the task, automatic image interpretation was subdivided into more specialised problems like the extraction of buildings or roads and natural objects like vegetation or water. A lot of very promising approaches were presented in the past, but at the same time the interpretation of the whole scene was not tackled in depth. In this paper we discuss different aspects of this issue and provide a frame for scene interpretation which is based on a GIS data model. Results of the proposed approach dealing with roads and trees and their interrelations are presented.