Orientation estimation of building using DSM and optical images based on Zernike moments

Digital Surface Models (DSMs) generated from airborne laser-scanning or stereo satellite images provide a very useful source of information for building orientation estimation. However, due to the high complexity of the building structure, it is hardly to get the details of the building boundary information. In this paper, a new orientation estimation method is proposed, which merge the edge information extracted from optical images into DSM, and take advantage of the ZM phase information in the orientation estimation process. The classical way of extracting Zernike features only takes into account the magnitude of the moments and loses the phase information. The novelty of our approach is to take advantage of the phase information of Zernike moments to capture these variabilities in a way that makes it robust in the context of rotation angle estimation.