Automatic building extraction from very high resolution satellite imagery using line segment detector

This paper presents an automatic procedure for rapid building extraction from optical very high resolution (VHR) satellite imagery. Classical extraction models are always complex and time-consuming. The optimized process of building extraction consists of three main rapid stages: edge-preserving and smoothing bilateral filter, line segment detection, perceptual grouping polygonal building boundary. Firstly, we use bilateral filter to smooth original image with edge-preserving. Secondly, a state-of-the-art line segment detector (LSD) algorithm gives highly accurate building contour segments. Finally, we apply the perceptual grouping approach based on graph search to organize detected contour line segments of interested buildings. We test our method on optical VHR QuickBird satellite imagery and obtain promising experimental results with overall accuracy of 79.1%, which confirm the effectiveness and robustness of this linear-time procedure.