Line-segment vectorization on high-resolution satellite images

Optical remote sensing images of urban areas usually contain large amount of line-segments that represent the boundaries of man-made objects. The extraction and vectorization of these line-segments are desirable for many applications, such as digital city reconstruction. This paper presents a “Sweep & Scan” algorithm for the extraction and vectorization of these line-segments. The “Sweep” part of the algorithm uses the Wallace parameterization of the Muff Transform to identify straight lines globally, and the “Scan” part uses edge continuation and intensity correlation to identify line-segments locally.