A FUZZY AUTOMATIC CAR DETECTION METHOD BASED ON HIGH RESOLUTION SATELLITE IMAGERY AND GEODESIC MORPHOLOGY

Abstract. Automatic car detection and recognition from aerial and satellite images is mostly practiced for the purpose of easy and fast traffic monitoring in cities and rural areas where direct approaches are proved to be costly and inefficient. Towards the goal of automatic car detection and in parallel with many other published solutions, in this paper, morphological operators and specifically Geodesic dilation are studied and applied on GeoEye-1 images to extract car items in accordance with available vector maps. The results of Geodesic dilation are then segmented and labeled to generate primitive car items to be introduced to a fuzzy decision making system, to be verified. The verification is performed inspecting major and minor axes of each region and the orientations of the cars with respect to the road direction. The proposed method is implemented and tested using GeoEye-1 pansharpen imagery. Generating the results it is observed that the proposed method is successful according to overall accuracy of 83%. It is also concluded that the results are sensitive to the quality of available vector map and to overcome the shortcomings of this method, it is recommended to consider spectral information in the process of hypothesis verification.