Building extraction from VHR imagery using Morphological Shadow and Building Operator

An automatic building extraction method for very high resolution satellite images is presented in this paper. Two novel operators Differential Morphological Shadow Operator (DMSO) and Differential Morphological Building Operator (DMBO) for extracting shadows and buildings respectively are proposed. The method identifies shadows using DMSO. After masking out the shadow, DMBO is applied to obtain the building candidates. The building candidates are filtered using four parameters including shadow test, Shape Index (SI), area and rectangular fit to remove false detections and obtain only buildings. The proposed method was tested on two VHR satellite images acquired by Geoeye-1.The results of the proposed method were compared with two other state of the art methods and it was observed that the proposed method outperformed the other two methods.