A supervised method for object-based 3D building change detection on aerial stereo images

Abstract. There is a great demand for studying the changes of buildings over time. The current trend for building change detection combines the orthophoto and DSM (Digital Surface Models). The pixel-based change detection methods are very sensitive to the quality of the images and DSMs, while the object-based methods are more robust towards these problems. In this paper, we propose a supervised method for building change detection. After a segment-based SVM (Support Vector Machine) classification with features extracted from the orthophoto and DSM, we focus on the detection of the building changes of different periods by measuring their height and texture differences, as well as their shapes. A decision tree analysis is used to assess the probability of change for each building segment and the traffic lighting system is used to indicate the status "change", "non-change" and "uncertain change" for building segments. The proposed method is applied to scanned aerial photos of the city of Zurich in 2002 and 2007, and the results have demonstrated that our method is able to achieve high detection accuracy.