ACCURATE AND FAST BUILDING DETECTION USING BINARY BAG-OF-FEATURES

Abstract. This paper presents a non-interactive building detection approach employing binary bag-of-features (BBOF), namely, extracting building roof contours in remote sensing images automatically, rapidly and accurately. The proposed method includes two major stages, i.e., building area detection and building contours extraction. In the first stage, it contains three modules. i.e., oversegmentation, intersection point classification, building area detection. Firstly, the orthophoto is over-segmented by the Simple Linear Iterative Clustering (SLIC) superpixel segmentation method, and the intersection points is obtained. Secondly, the oriented FAST and rotated BRIEF (ORB) descriptors are generated in LAB colour space from the patches that centred on the intersection points, and the BBOF classifier is adopted to classify the intersection points into two categories. Thirdly, the area that contains of the building roof are detected through reserving the regions around the intersection points in inner parts of building roof, and eliminating the regions around the intersection points in non-building roof. At last, we can roughly generate the building area. For the second stage, it is similar to the first one while the main difference is that its classifier has three categories. Finally, we provide an evaluation between two different classifiers, including ORB+BBOF and SURF+BOF. This evaluation is conducted on orthophotos with different roof colours, texture, shape, size and orientation. The proposed approach presents several advantages in terms of scalability, suitability and simplicity with respect to the existing methods.