Extraction of urban buildings using color image processing and morphological operations

Abstract

In many geospatial applications, automated detection of buildings has become a key concern in recent years. Determination of building locations provides great benefits for numerous geospatial applications such as urban planning, disaster management, infrastructure planning, environmental monitoring. The study  aims to present a practical technique for extracting the buildings from high-resolution satellite images using color image segmentation and binary morphological image processing. The proposed method is implemented on satellite images of 4 different selected study areas of the city of Batikent, Ankara.  According to experiments conducted on the study areas, overall accuracy, sensitivity, and F1 values were computed to be on average, respectively. After applying morphological operations, the same metrics are calculated . The results show that the determination of urban buildings can be done more successfully with the suitable combination of morphological operations using rectangular structuring element.

Keywords: Building Extraction; Colour Image Processing;Colour space conversion; Image Morphology; Remote Sensing