AN IMAGE SEGMENTATION LEVEL SET METHOD FOR BUILDING DETECTION

In this paper the advanced method of geodesic active contours was developed for the task of building detection from aerial and satellite images. Automatic extraction of man-made structures including buildings, building blocks or roads from remote sensing data is useful for land use mapping, scene understanding, robotic navigation, image retrieval, surveillance, emergency management procedures, cadastral etc. A level set method based on a region-driven segmentation model was implemented with which building boundaries were detected, through this curve propagation technique. The essence of this approach is to optimize the position and the geometric form of the curve by measuring information along that curve, and within the regions that compose the image partition. To this end, one can consider uniform intensities inside objects and the background. Thus, given an initial position of the curve, one can determine global, region-driven functions and provide a statistical description of the inside and outside object area. The calculus of variations and a gradient descent method was used to optimize the variational functional by an iterative steady state process. Experimental results demonstrate the potential of the proposed processing scheme.