THE STUDY ON HEIGHT INFORMATION EXTRACTION OF CULTURAL FEATURES IN REMOTE SENSING IMAGES BASED ON SHADOW AREAS

Abstract. Cultural feature is important element in geospatial information library and the height information is important information of cultural features. The existences of the height information and its precision have direct influence over topographic map, especially the quality of large-scale and medium-scale topographic map, and the level of surveying and mapping support. There are a lot of methods about height information extraction, in which the main methods are ground survey (field direct measurement) spatial sensor and photogrammetric ways. However, automatic extraction is very tough. This paper has had an emphasis on segmentation algorithm on shadow areas under multiple constraints and realized automatic extraction of height information by using shadow. Binarization image can be obtained using gray threshold estimated under the multiple constraints. On the interesting area, spot elimination and region splitting are made. After region labeling and non-shadowed regions elimination, shadow area of cultural features can be found. Then height of the cultural features can be calculated using shadow length, sun altitude angle, azimuth angle, and sensor altitude angle, azimuth angle. A great many of experiments have shown that mean square error of the height information of cultural features extraction is close to 2 meter and automatic extraction rate is close to 70%.