Acta Geodaetica et Cartographica Sinica

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Unsupervised urban detection from High-Resolution Remote-Sensing Imagery based on Improved Harris corner detector

  

  • Received:2012-09-21 Revised:2013-12-02 Online:2014-02-20 Published:2013-12-19

Abstract:

Traditional urban detection methods are mainly based on global image feature, such as texture, spectrum and shape etc. However, these features are not invariant to scale and illumination changes, which consequently reduce the robust of the existing algorithms. To solve this problem, we propose the use of local feature for urban detection from high-resolution remote-sensing imagery. The proposed method consists of three steps: First, we extract a large set of local feature point by Harris corner detector. In order to achieve a reliable extraction of corners from urban areas, we further propose two criterions to validate and filter them. Afterwards, we incorporate the extracted corners into a likelihood function, and use it to measure the possibility of each pixel belonging to the urban area. Finally, we extract urban area by an adaptive binary segmentation method. Experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms the existing algorithms in terms of detection accuracy.

Key words: high-resolution remote-sensing imagery, urban extraction, corner detection, probability likelihood function voting

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