Orientation Based Building Outline Extraction in Aerial Images

The goal of this paper is to extract automatically the building contours regardless of shape. By extracting these contours, detection results will be more accurate, giving useful information about urban area, which is important for many tasks, like map updating and disaster management. First, we extract local feature points from the image, based on a modification of Harris detector’s saliency function, which can represent urban area and building effectively. This point set is then used to define the main orientation of the buildings, which characterizes well an urban region and helps to define directions, where object contours have to be searched. Second, we applied shearlet approach to extract edges in the defined directions. This results in an edge map, which helps us to determine point subsets belonging to the same building. Convex hulls of the point subsets is used for contour initialization, then region based Chan-Vese Active Contour method is applied to extract the accurate building outlines.