Task driven perceptual organization for extraction of rooftop polygons

A new method for extracting planar polygonal rooftops in monocular aerial imagery is proposed. Structural features are extracted and hierarchically related using perceptual grouping techniques. Top-down feature verification is used so that features, and links between the features, are verified with local information in the image and weighed in a graph. Cycles in the graph correspond to possible building rooftop hypotheses. Virtual features are hypothesized for the perceptual completion of partially occluded rooftops. Extraction of the “best” grouping features into a building rooftop hypothesis is posed as a graph search problem. The maximally weighted, independent set of cycles in the graph is extracted as the final set of roof boundaries