A new building mask using the gradient of heights for automatic building extraction
- Authors: Siddiqui, Fasahat , Awrangjeb, Mohammad , Teng, Shyh , Lu, Guojun
- Date: 2016
- Type: Text , Conference proceedings
- Relation: 2016 International Conference on Digital Image Computing: Techniques and Applications (Dicta); Gold Coast, Australia; 30th November-2nd December 2016 p. 288-294
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- Description: A number of building detection methods have been proposed in the literature. However, they are not effective in detecting small buildings (typically, 50 m(2)) and buildings with transparent roof due to the way area thresholds and ground points are used. This paper proposes a new building mask to overcome these limitations and enables detection of buildings not only with transparent roof materials but also which are small in size. The proposed building detection method transforms the non-ground height information into an intensity image and then analyses the gradient information in the image. It uses a small area threshold of 1 m2 and, thereby, is able to detect small buildings such as garden sheds. The use of non-ground points allows analyses of the gradient on all types of roof materials and, thus, the method is also able to detect buildings with transparent roofs. Our experimental results show that the proposed method can successfully extract buildings even when their roofs are small and/or transparent, thereby, achieving relatively higher average completeness and quality.
An improved building detection in complex sites using the LIDAR height variation and point density
- Authors: Siddiqui, Fasahat , Teng, Shyh , Lu, Guojun , Awrangjeb, Mohammad
- Date: 2013
- Type: Text , Conference proceedings
- Relation: 2013 28th International Conference on Image and Vision Computing New Zealand, IVCNZ 2013; Wellington; New Zealand; 27th-29th November 2013; published in International Conference Image and Vision Computing New Zealand p. 471-476
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- Description: In this paper, the height variation in LIDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) point cloud data and point density are analyzed to remove the false building detection in highly vegetation and hilly sites. In general, the LIDAR points in a tree area have higher height variations than those in a building area. Moreover, the density of points having similar height values is lower in a tree area than in a building area. The proposed method uses such information as an improvement to a current state-of-the-art building detection method. The qualitative and object-based quantitative analyzes have been performed to verify the effectiveness of the proposed building detection method as compared with a current method. The analysis shows that proposed building detection method successfully reduces false building detection (i.e. trees in high complex sites of Australia and Germany), and the average correctness and quality have been improved by 6.36% and 6.16% respectively.
A robust gradient based method for building extraction from LiDAR and photogrammetric imagery
- Authors: Siddiqui, Fasahat , Teng, Shyh , Awrangjeb, Mohammad , Lu, Guojun
- Date: 2016
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Sensors (Switzerland) Vol. 16, no. 7 (2016), p. 1-24
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- Description: Existing automatic building extraction methods are not effective in extracting buildings which are small in size and have transparent roofs. The application of large area threshold prohibits detection of small buildings and the use of ground points in generating the building mask prevents detection of transparent buildings. In addition, the existingmethods use numerous parameters to extract buildings in complex environments, e.g.,hilly area and high vegetation. However, the empirical tuning of large number of parameters reduces the robustness of building extraction methods. This paper proposes a novel Gradient-based Building Extraction (GBE) method to address these limitations. The proposed method transforms the Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR) height information into intensity image without interpolation of point heights and then analyses the gradient information in the image. Generally, building roof planes have a constant height change along the slope of a roof plane whereas trees have a random height change. With such an analysis, buildings of a greater range of sizes with a transparent or opaque roof can be extracted. In addition, a local colour matching approach is introduced as a post-processing stage to eliminate trees. This stage of our proposed method does not require any manual setting and all parameters are set automatically from the data. The other post processing stages including variance, point density and shadow elimination are also applied to verify the extracted buildings, where comparatively fewer empirically set parameters are used. The performance of the proposed GBE method is evaluated on two benchmark data sets by using the object and pixel based metrics (completeness, correctness and quality). Our experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method in eliminating trees, extracting buildings of all sizes, and extracting buildings with and without transparent roof. When compared with current state-of-the-art building extraction methods, the proposed method outperforms the existing methods in various evaluation metrics. © 2016 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
Automatic Extraction of Buildings in an Urban Region
- Authors: Siddiqui, Fasahat , Teng, Shyh , Lu, Guojun , Awrangjeb, Mohammad
- Date: 2014
- Type: Text , Conference proceedings
- Relation: 29th International Conference on Image and Vision Computing New Zealand, IVCNZ 2014; Hamilton; New Zealand; 19th-21st November 2014; published in ACM International Conference Proceeding Series p. 178-183
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- Description: There are currently several automatic building extraction methods introduced in the literature, but none of them are capable to completely extract portions of a building that are below a pre-defined building minimum height threshold. This paper proposes a systematic method which analyzes the height differences between the extracted adjacent planes above and below the height threshold as well as the planes' connectivity, thereby, extracting all portions belonging to buildings more completely. In general, the height difference between the edges of the adjacent planes above and below the height threshold that belong to the same building is more uniform. In addition, the extracted planes below the height threshold that belong to a building and their adjacent ground planes also have a clear height difference. The proposed method incorporates such information to achieve better performance in building extraction. We have compared our proposed method to a current state-of-the-art building extraction method qualitatively and quantitatively. Our experimental results show that our proposed method successfully recovers portions of a building below the height threshold, thereby achieving relatively higher average completeness (an improvement of 1.14%) and quality (an improvement of 0.93%).