Urban area detection and segmentation using OTB

One of the key features requested by the users of the upcoming ORFEO system is the availability of tools for urban area monitoring. The needs go from coarse urban extension delimitation to individual building detection. In this context, several algorithms have been implemented and assessed in the ORFEO Toolbox library. In this work the implementation of three algorithms for urban area extraction and their assessment in terms of quality of the results and processing time are presented. These algorithms have been developed using the ORFEO Toolbox, OTB, and two of them are available inside the library since version 3.0 (April 2009).