Building Detection Using Enhanced HOG–LBP Features and Region Refinement Processes

Abstract

Building detection from two-dimensional high-resolution satellite images is a computer vision, photogrammetry, and remote sensing task that has arisen in the last decades with the advances in sensors technology and can be utilized in several applications that require the creation of urban maps or the study of urban changes. However, the variety of irrelevant objects that appear in an urban environment and resemble buildings, and the significant variations in the shape and generally the appearance of buildings render building detection a quite demanding task. As a result, automated methods that can robustly detect buildings in satellite images are necessary. To this end, we propose a building detection method that consists of two modules. The first module is a feature detector that extracts histograms of oriented gradients (HOG) and local binary patterns (LBP) from image regions. Using a novel approach, a support vector machine classifier is trained with the introduction of a special denoising distance measure for the computation of distances between HOG–LBP descriptors before their classification to the building or nonbuilding class. The second module consists of a set of region refinement processes that employs the output of the HOG–LBP detector in the form of detected rectangular image regions. Image segmentation is performed and a novel building recognition methodology is proposed to accurately identify building regions, while simultaneously discard false detections of the first module of the proposed method. We demonstrate that the proposed methodology can robustly detect buildings from satellite images and outperforms state-of-the-art building detection methods.