Shadow Based Building Extraction From Single Satellite Image

Automatic building extraction in satellite imagery is an important problem. Existing approaches typically involve stereo processing two or more satellite views of the same region. In this paper, we use shadow analysis coupled with line segment detection and texture segmentation to construct rectangular building approximations from a single satellite image. In addition, we extract building heights to construct a rectilinear height profile for a single region. We characterize the performance of the system in rural and urban regions of Jordan, Philippines, and Australia and demonstrate a detection rate of 76.2 - 86.1 % and a false alarm rate of 26.5 - 40.1 %.