A system to detect residential area in multispectral satellite images

In this paper, we propose a new solution to extract complex structures from High-Resolution (HR) remote-sensing images. We propose to represent shapes and there relations by using region adjacency graphs. They are generated automatically from the segmented images. Thus, the nodes of the graph represent shape like houses, streets or trees, while arcs describe the adjacency relation between them. In order to be invariant to transformations such as rotation and scaling, the extraction of objects of interest is done by combining two techniques: one based on roof color to detect the bounding boxes of houses, and one based on mathematical morphology notions to detect streets. To recognize residential areas, a model described by a regular language is built. The detection is achieved by looking for a path in the region adjacency graph, which can be recognized as a word belonging to the description language. Our algorithm was tested with success on images from Quickbird satellite representing the urban area of Strasbourg (France) at different spatial resolution.