Study on outline extraction for ground buildings in high resolution SAR images

This paper analyses the visual characteristics of ground buildings in high resolution SAR images: the L-shaped echoes resulted from layer over and corner reflection effects give expression to the information of location and height of buildings. Therefore, to vectorize the L-shaped outline of the buildings has a great value in the field of city mapping. Focusing on L-shaped echoes, this paper investigates an outline vectorization algorithm for buildings. Firstly, the method counters the image after segmentation, then gets the main direction of buildings based on Hough Transform. After using polygon approaches on the outline, finally, the method adopts piecewise linear fitting by least-square algorithm and constructs 3-D model of buildings. Experiments on SAR images show that this approach is much fast in extraction of ground buildings with convenience and practicality.