A New Method for Ellipse Fitting in Satellite Images

A new method for ellipse fitting in satellite image is proposed. First, line segments are extracted and classified into one of three categories: straight line, elliptic line, and pseudo-elliptic line segments. Then elliptic segments are fitted directly with non-iterative ellipse-specific method proposed by Fitzgibbon et al[12]. For pseudo-elliptic segments, we start fitting ellipse with large eccentricity, merge nearby pseudo-elliptic segments that share same monotonicity, validate fitted ellipse, and accept if validation succeeds. If validation fails, fitting process is repeated by lowering eccentricity until either validation succeeds or eccentricity hits zero. We tested the method on some satellite image and obtained good results.