Building Detection from Multiple Views

In this paper we presented a novel approach for building detection from multiple aerial images in dense urban areas. The approach is based on accurate surface reconstruction, followed by extraction of visible building facades, then used as a main cue for building detection. For the facade detection a simple but nevertheless flexible and robust algorithm is proposed. It is based on observation that building facades correspond to the accumulation of 3D data, available from different views, in the object space. Knowledge-driven thresholding of 3D data accumulators followed by Hough transformbased segment detection results in facade extraction. The extracted facades are not only explicitly geo-referenced, but their visible sides are also tracked. Then, 3D regions resulting from surface reconstruction procedure and bounded by the extracted facades are detected as building hypotheses through testing a set of spatial criteria. The approach has been tested on the complex and dense urban scenes, and demonstrated a good rate of building detection.