Residential area information extraction by combining China airborne SAR and optical images

Residential area extraction from remote sensing data plays an important role for map updating. In this paper, a fused method is proposed to extract residential area information originating from China airborne SAR and optical data. First, the airborne SAR and optical images are registered. Then texture analysis, using gray level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) texture features, is applied to the SAR image. According to those texture features, with a proper threshold, the silhouette of building area can be obtained. With the optical multispectral image, vegetation plots in residential area are extracted. The logic OR is applied to fuse the processed results of the SAR and optical images. Finally, the coverage of residential areas is overlaid on the optical image to check the effectiveness of this method.