An Efficient Multi-stage Object-Based Classification to Extract Urban Building Footprints from HR Satellite Images

Urban building information can be effectively extracted by applying object-based image segmentation and multi-stage thresholding on High Resolution (HR) remote sensing satellite imageries. This study provides the results obtained using this method on the images of Indian remote sensing satellite, CARTOSAT-2S launched by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO). In this study, a method is developed to extract urban building footprints from the HR remote sensing satellite images. The first step of the process consists of generating highly dense per pixel Digital Surface Model (DSM) by using semi global matching algorithm on HR satellite stereo images and applying robust ground filtering to generate Digital Terrain Model (DTM). In the second step, multi-stage object-based approach is adopted to extract building bases using the PAN sharpened image, normalized Digital Surface Model (nDSM) derived from DSM and DTM, and Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). The results are compared with the manual method of drawing building footprints by cartographers. An average precision of 0.930, recall of 0.917, and f-score of 0.922 are obtained. The results are found to be in a match with the method using the high resolution Airborne LiDAR DSM by providing a solution for large areas, low cost and low time.