USING REMOTE-SENSING AND GIS TECHNOLOGY FOR AUTOMATED BUILDING EXTRACTION A Dissertation Presented to The Academic Faculty by Liora Sahar In partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in Design Computing in the College of Architecture Georgia Institute of Technology December, 2009 COPYRIGHT 2009 BY LIORA SAHAR USING REMOTE-SENSING AND GIS TECHNOLOGY FOR AUTOMATED BUILDING EXTRACTION Approved by: Dr. Steven P. French, Advisor Prof. Nickolas Faust College of Architecture GTRI - Georgia Tech Research Institute Georgia Institute of Technology Georgia Institute of Technology Dr. William Drummond Prof. Charles Eastman College of Architecture College of Architecture Georgia Institute of Technology Georgia Institute of Technology Dr. Shamkant Navathe College of Computing Georgia Institute of Technology Date Approved: July 28th, 2009 DEDICATION To my Husband, Yinon ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The achievements of the past several years have not been possible without the help of numerous friends, colleagues, teachers and family members. First and foremost, I would like to acknowledge the endless support and love of my husband Yinon. There are no words to describe how grateful I am for your encouragement during the good but mainly the hard times. There is definitely a toll that my entire family had to incur throughout that time period. My three lovely daughters, Stav, Keren and Amy, who was born in the process, have all contributed in their own special way. Their love, understanding and constant reminder of what is truly important, made all the difference. I would like to thank my wonderful parents for their faith in me and their unconditional love and support all those years. This work would not have been possible without the support, guidance and commitment of my advisor, Dr. Steven French. His contribution goes beyond this work to provide me with the knowledge and tools to pursuit my professional ambitions within the GIS arena. I would like to specially acknowledge and thank Prof. Nick Faust for the significant contribution in the fields of Remote Sensing and image processing. Your insight, constant feedback and guidance were invaluable to the accomplishment of this dissertation. I would also like to thank my committee members, Dr. William Drummond, Dr. Shamkant Navathe and Prof. Charles Eastman for their comments, patience and time. My sincere thanks go to all research scientists and students at the Center for GIS. I would like to specially thank Dr. Subrahmanyam Muthukumar for the constant support and stir of ideas as well as my dear office mate Ning Ai. iv Finally, gratitude is expressed to the Mid-America Earthquake Center – this research was supported by the Mid-America Earthquake Center under National Science Foundation Grant EEC-9701785 v TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................................................IV LIST OF TABLES .......................................................................................................................IX LIST OF FIGURES ...................................................................................................................... X LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ..................................................................................................XVI SUMMARY ... ....................................................................................................................... XVII CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION...............................................................................................1 1.1 GENERAL...............................................................................................................................1 1.2 PROBLEM STATEMENT.........................................................................................................4 1.3 SIGNIFICANCE AND CONTRIBUTION TO THE FIELD ............................................................5 1.4 ORGANIZATION OF DISSERTATION .....................................................................................7 CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW ................................................................................10 2.1 EVOLUTION OF PHOTOGRAMMETRY AND REMOTE SENSING LEADING TO FEATURE EXTRACTION .................................................................................................................................11 2.2 BUILDING EXTRACTION – GENERAL.................................................................................12 2.3 HIGH RESOLUTION SATELLITE IMAGERY ........................................................................15 2.3.1 Data Classification Techniques from remotely sensed data .......................................15 2.3.2 Building Extraction from Satellite Imagery.................................................................22 2.4 IMAGE PROCESSING TECHNIQUES .....................................................................................25 2.5 SUPPLEMENTING WITH EXISTING SPATIAL DATA.............................................................27 2.6 LIDAR AND LASER SCAN BASED METHODS .....................................................................28 2.7 IMAGE SUBSETTING APPROACHES.....................................................................................31 2.8 SHAPE IDENTIFICATION TECHNIQUES AND MEASURES ....................................................33 CHAPTER 3 METHODOLOGY ...........................................................................................36 3.1 HISTOGRAM ANALYSIS ......................................................................................................40 3.2 FEATURE SEGMENTATION .................................................................................................42 3.3 PARCEL-ATTRIBUTE BASED ELIMINATION........................................................................44 3.4 SHADOWS ............................................................................................................................44 3.5 GEOMETRY BASED ELIMINATION OF LOW-PROBABILITY BUILDING SEGMENTS............46 3.6 LOCATING THE FOOTPRINT OF THE BUILDING .................................................................47 3.7 GENERALIZATION...............................................................................................................48 vi CHAPTER 4 IMPLEMENTATION AND EVALUATION.................................................49 4.1 METHODOLOGY IMPLEMENTATION DOCUMENTATION ..................................................49 4.1.1 Image Subsetting.............................................................................................................49 4.1.2 Histogram Analysis and Image Segmentation .............................................................50 4.1.2.1 Histogram Analysis .......................................................................................................50 4.1.2.2 Feature Segmentation....................................................................................................55 4.1.2.3 Shadow Segmentation ...................................................................................................56 4.1.2.4 Segments Post Processing .............................................................................................59 4.1.3 Eliminate By Parcel Attribute Analysis........................................................................62 4.1.4 Eliminate by shadow Analysis .......................................................................................75 4.1.5 Eliminate by Geometry analysis....................................................................................82 4.1.5.1 Evaluating geometric measures for buildings and non-building segments ...................89 4.1.5.2 Geometry parameters definition....................................................................................91 4.1.6 Raster to Vector and Generalization ..........................................................................100 4.2 RESULT EVALUATION.......................................................................................................106 4.2.1 Memphis Test-Bed........................................................................................................106 4.2.2 Commercial Parcels Testing ........................................................................................111 4.2.2.1 Testing Results ............................................................................................................112 4.2.2.2 Extraction Failure Factors ...........................................................................................118 4.2.2.3 Multi-building parcels .................................................................................................121 4.2.2.4 Parcel-sized images .....................................................................................................123 4.2.3 Residential Parcels Testing ..........................................................................................127 4.2.3.1 Residential Parcels Analysis .......................................................................................128 4.2.3.2 Region Growing Algorithm.........................................................................................130 4.2.3.3 Three algorithms segmentation testing........................................................................133 4.2.3.4 Residential Testing Conclusions .................................................................................162 4.2.4