AUTOMATIC EXTRACTION OF BUILDINGS IN URBAN AREAS FROM VERY HIGH RESOLUTION SATELLITE IMAGES

M. Ghanea a, *, P. Moallem b, M. Momeni a

a

Dept. of Surveying Eng., Faculty of Eng., University of Isfahan, Isfahan, Iran - (m.ghane, momeni@eng.ui.ac.ir) b Dept. of Electrical Eng., Faculty of Eng., University of Isfahan, Isfahan, Iran - p_moallem@eng.ui.ac.ir
Session C1

KEY WORDS: Building Extraction, Very High Resolution (VHR) Satellite Images, Urban Area, K-means Clustering, Region Growing, Boundary Improvement

ABSTRACT: Due to developing satellite technology, extraction of man-made features such as roads and buildings has become a topic of interest for photogrammetric and remote sensing communities. Extraction of buildings in urban areas is a complicated problem due to the complexity of shapes, textures, and contexts. In order to dealing with this problem, an object-based image analysis is used to generate homogeneous regions from a pixel-based image, which is called image segmentation. This article introduces a region-based image segmentation algorithm based on k-means clustering in order to extract buildings. The algorithm contains three steps: (1) clustering procedure, (2) image segmentation, and (3) boundary improvement. The approach is evaluated using a case study in Tehran, Islamic Republic of Iran. Very high resolution GeoEye satellite imagery was used in the case study. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm extracts 76.1 % of building areas with a quality percentage 62.9 % in an urban area.

1. INTRODUCTION Automatic extraction of man-made objects from satellite images is a significant research task in photogrammetry and remote sensing. With a rapid increase of satellite technology, it is urgent to extract man-made objects, such as buildings and roads, from satellite images. Data acquisition for mapping and Geospatial Information System (GIS) by photogrammetric methods has traditionally been carried out in manual extraction of cartographic features from images of the terrain surface ranging in scale from 1:3000 to 1:90000 (Sowmya and Trinder, 2000). Although this strategy is efficient under the viewpoints of accuracy and precession, it is generally time-consuming and expensive, what certainly have limited the amount, resolution, and revision cycles of terrain information that can be extracted by using current digital photogrammetric systems. (Dal Poz and do Vale, 2003). In this context, building extraction has remained as an important issue of research. Up to now, fully automatic algorithms for building extraction seem to be far away from a plenary state and, consequently, no such operational system is expected to be available in near future. Image segmentation is the process of dividing an image into homogenous regions, which is a neccessary step for higher level image processing such as image analysis, pattern recognition, and automatic image interpretation (Blaschke and Strobl, 2001). So far, there are over 1000 types of developed segmentation methods (Zhang, 2001). General segmentation methods consist of global behaviour-based and local behaviourbased methods (Kartikeyan et al., 1998). Global behaviourbased methods group the pixels based on the analysis of the data in the feature space. Typical examples are clustering and histogram thresholding. Local behaviour-based methods analyze the variation of spectral features in a small neighbourhood. Typical examples are edge detection and region extraction (Fu and Mui, 1981).

However, as reported in (Li et al., 2008), not all of the segmentation methods are possible for high resolution satellite imagery due to the following facts: 1. This imagery is multi-spectral and multi-scale, so both the complexity and redundancy are increased obviously. 2. The imagery provides the more details such as color, shape, context and texture. 3. Different class has its inherent features in different scale. E.g. at coarse scales we may find fields, while at finer scales we may find individual trees or plants. So the segmentation model on one scale must be modified when used on the other scale. In this article, a fully automatic algorithm is introduced for building extraction from high resolution multispectral GeoEye imagery. For this purpose, we present a region-based image segmentation procedure together with a boundary improvement algorithm. The proposed algorithm is evaluated for a case study in Tehran, Islamic Republic of Iran. The remainder of this article is organized as follows: Section 2 explains the proposed algorithm in detail. Section 3 presents experimental results, and Section 4 concludes the work.

2. OVERVIEW OF THE ALGORITHM Figure 1 depicts a flow diagram of the proposed algorithm. At first, clustering procedure is used in order to divide an original image into a binary clustered image including building and nonbuilding layers. A k-means clustering algorithm is applied because it is able to use all of the multi-spectral bands for providing a single band clustered image. In the second step, we apply a kind of region-based image segmentation which includes k-means clustering and single thresholding, seed point generation, and region growing. In the final step, boundary of

* Corresponding author. This is useful to know for communication with the appropriate person in cases with more than one author.

extracted buildings is improved by a logical process. sections describe each step in detail.

Next

Original image

Predefined number of clusters

Centroids determination

Figure 1. Flow diagram of the proposed algorithm 2.1 Clustering Procedure In order to divide an original image (see Figure 3.a) into a clustered image (see Figure 3.b), a well-known clustering procedure referred to as k-means clustering (Gray and Linde, 1982; Seber, 1984; Spath, 1985) is used. An overview of the kmeans clustering algorithm is shown in Figure 2. The procedure is initialised by selecting the predefined number of centeroids (k) in the multi spectral space. The selection of these centeroids at this stage is arbitrary with exception that no two may be the same. The location of each pixel in the image is examined and the pixel is assigned to the nearest candidate centeroid. This assignment would be made on the basis of the Euclidean distance measure. Then, the new set of centeroids is computed. This two-phase procedure is repeated until it reaches the maximum iteration (m). Two parameters k and m must be specified beforehand by the user. The generated clustered image includes building and non-building layers.

Compute distance to centroids for each building pixel

Assigning each building pixel to its nearest centroid

> Maximum iteration Yes Clustered image

No

Figure 2. Overview of the k-means clustering algorithm

(a)

(b) Figure 3. Applying k-means clustering with k = 2 and m = 4 on the original image. (a) Original image, and (b) Clustered image 2.2 Image Segmentation Since the generated building layer contains buildings and their adjacent similar spectral features such as roads, shadows, cars, yards etc, firstly, we must separate all features as it is possible and then extract building features. For this purpose, a regionbased image segmentation algorithm is used. The image

segmentation consists of three steps. At first, k-means clustering divides the building layer into predetermined number of clusters (see Figure 4.a). The predetermined number is selected on the basis of the building variation in size, shape, and color. Each cluster contains a set of discontinuous regions. In order to separate small regions from big ones, the histogram of all regions is plotted in order to represent cumulative distribution of pixels for each region (see Figure 4.b). If the number of pixels belonging to a region is less than a userdefined threshold, then this region is removed. The resulting image is shown in Figure 4.c.

Seed x = Seed y =

i rgn x i .g(x i ,y i ) i rgn i rgn g(x i ,y i ) g(x i ,y i )

(1)

i rgn y i .g(x i ,y i )

where rgn is an evaluation region and g(xi,yi) is the gray scale value of the ith point which belongs to the region. Both spatial (i.e. (xi,yi)) and homogeneity (i.e. g(xi,yi)) information take part in defining seed points. So seed points as starting points are more suitable than centeroids for a region growing stage. The generated image depicts regions with their seed points (see Figure 5).

(a)

Figure 5.

Seed point generation and region growing. Regions, and (b) Regions with their seed points

(a)

In the final stage, a region growing method is performed to extract buildings. For this purpose, the process starts at each seed point in the image with one-pixel objects, and in numerous subsequent steps, smaller image objects are merged into bigger ones (Carleer et al., 2005). The similarity condition is defined by means of a logical statement if pixels in the region are similar enough in terms of spectral variance property as follows:
True Var(g(Seed x , Seed y ), g(x1 , y1 ),.., g(xn , yn )) < rgn else False

(b)

(2)

where (x1,y1), (x2,y2), ..., and (xn,yn) are the points added to a seed point based on the similarity condition. rgn is a region threshold that is defined by computing the variance of all points which belong to a region. The product image is illustrated in Figure 6. (c) Figure 4. Applying k-means clustering and thresholding on the building layer, respectively. (a) K-means clustering, (b) Histogram for the discontinuous regions, and (c) Thresholding (regions are shown with different colors) At second, seed point generation is implemented automatically in order to provide seed points for region growing. Firstly, the original image is converted into an 8-bit gray scale image. Then the position of a seed point for each region is defined as follows:

Figure 6. Building extraction after applying region growing 2.3 Boundary Improvement After extracting buildings, there are still some irregularities on the boundary of extracted buildings due to similar spectra between buildings and their adjacent features. In order to remove these irregularities, if area of a rectangular part locating

on the boundary of a building (see Figure 7.a) is more than an area threshold and its width is less than a length threshold, this part must be removed. These thresholds must be known beforehand by the user. Figure 7 depicts the effect of boundary improvement on a building boundary.

and False Negative (FN) values by the comparison of the manual and the automatic method. TP refers to the pixels determined as building both in the manual and the automatic method. TN refers to the pixels that are not determined as building in the manual and the automatic method, respectively. FP refers to the buildings that cannot be determined and FN refers to the pixels which are determined as buildings although they are not in the manual method. The following factors are computed with the help of these values:

Branching Factor =
(a) (b) Figure 7. Boundary improvement, before and after. (a) Before (red rectangles represent rectangular parts on the boundary of a building), and (b) After

FP , TP
(3)

Miss Factor =

FN , TP

3. EXPERIMENTAL AND RESULTS 3.1 Data and Study Area The study area is an urban area at the center of the City of Tehran, Islamic Republic of Iran. We used a GeoEye satellite image which has 11-bit radiometric resolution and consists of five bands, four multi-spectral bands (i.e. Blue, Green, Red, and NIR) at a spatial resolution of 1.65 x 1.65 m, and one panchromatic band at a spatial resolution of 0.41 x 0.41 m. Before building extraction, the multi-spectral bands and the panchromatic band are pan sharpened. The sub-image size was 2000 x 2000 pixels (i.e. 0.8 x 0.8 km). The result of building extraction for a subsection of the study area is shown in Figure 8.

100 TP , TP + FN 100 TP Quality Percentage = TP + FN + FP Detection Percentage =

The detection percentage denotes the percentage of building pixels correctly labeled by the automatic process. The branching factor is a measure of the commission error where the algorithm incorrectly labels background pixels as building. The miss factor measures the omission error where the algorithm incorrectly labels building pixels as background. The miss factor can be derived from the detection percentage. Among these statistics, the quality percentage measures the absolute quality of the extraction and, consequently, it is the most determinative criterion. The results of the accuracy assessment show that the algorithm provides 76.1 % of DP which indicates the appropriate generality of the proposed algorithm. The QP is calculated as 62.9 % that is suitable for urban areas (see Table 1).

TP 171547 6 (a)

Number of pixels TN FP 127654 47028 8 7

FN 53768 9

BF 0.2 7

Percentage MF DP 0.3 76. 1 1

QP 62. 9

Table 1. Accuracy assessment of the proposed algorithm

4. CONCLUSIONS In this article, we presented a fully automatic algorithm for building extraction from a multispectral pan sharpened GeoEye satellite image. The core components of the schema are clustering procedure, image segmentation, and boundary improvement. Our building extraction detected 76.1 % of the building areas for an urban area in Tehran, Islamic Republic of Iran with a quality percentage of 62.9 %. This extraction performance shows that the proposed algorithm is effective in urban areas. However, there are still some misclassications in the extraction. Future work will extend our algorithm in two ways. We plan to use the Active Contour Model (ACM) and Least Square (LS) algorithms in order to extract boundaries of buildings. We plan to determine the initial values automatically in order to achieve the best results.

(b) Figure 8. Building extraction, before and after. (a) Before (original image), and (b) After (building image) 3.2 Accuracy Assessment To evaluate the accuracy of our algorithm, we calculated factors which are introduced by Shufelt, 1999 and Lee et al., 2003. The extracted and the manually buildings are compared pixelby-pixel. The accuracy assessment involves computation of True Positive (TP), True Negative (TN), False Positive (FP),

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