Urban area detection using multiple Kernel Learning and graph cut

This paper presents a new method for urban detection from high-spatial-resolution satellite images. Unlike traditional approaches using only texture information for urban detection, we integrate several complementary image features through multiple Kernel Learning framework, and demonstrate that fusing multiple features can help improving urban detection accuracy rate. Furthermore, since that most of supervised urban classification approaches are mainly based on block-based image interpretation, the resulting urban boundary is very coarse. To handle this, we formulate the urban boundary refinement as a binary labeling problem, and propose a graph cut based approach to solve it. Experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms the existing algorithm in terms of detection accuracy.