A building roof detection method using snake model in high resolution satellite imagery

Many building detection methods mainly rely on line segments extracted from aerial or satellite imagery. Building detection methods based on line segments, however, are difficult to succeed in high resolution satellite imagery such as IKONOS imagery, for most buildings in IKONOS imagery have small size of roofs with low contrast between roof and background. In this paper, we propose an efficient method to extract line segments and group them at the same time. First, edge preserving filtering is applied to the imagery to remove the noise. Second, we segment the imagery by watershed method, which collects the pixels with similar intensities to obtain homogeneous region. The boundaries of homogeneous region are not completely coincident with roof boundaries due to low contrast in the vicinity of the roof boundaries. Finally, to resolve this problem, we set up snake model with segmented region boundaries as initial snake's positions. We used a greedy algorithm to fit a snake to roof boundary. Experimental results show our method can obtain more .correct roof boundary with small size and low contrast from IKONOS imagery. Snake algorithm, building roof detection, watershed segmentation, edge-preserving filtering