Image Analysis for GIS Data Acquisition

Abstract

The automatic interpretation of aerial and satellite imagery by means of image analysis is currently one of the major research tasks in photogrammetry and related disciplines. The primary goal is the automatic extraction of visible, spatial topographic objects from imagery. The extracted objects represent one possible form of input for creating geographic databases. In this paper, different aspects of image analysis are discussed and a framework is provided for scene interpretation, which is based on the integration of image analysis and a GIS data model. Two examples concerned with the combined extraction of roads and trees, and with the multitemporal interpretation and monitoring of moorland, are given to illustrate the research.